Nintendo’s augmented reality app has delivered droves of consumers to designated lures – the stores and restaurants and landmarks that serve as prime hunting grounds for gamers using their smartphones to track darling zubats and pink swirls.
At first glance, it may seem that it will only be a matter of time before this cutting-edge gaming technology appears on the trade show floor. But Joel McCall, executive design director at George P. Johnson Experience Marketing Agency, pointed out that the geotracking and augmented reality features behind the Pokemon craze have been in the events marketer’s tool bag for years.
The new element – the one making all of the difference – has little to do with the advancing gadgetry and much more to do with the successful application of branded storytelling.
“Pokémon GO is putting a story to a marketing tool that we’ve had for a long time,” McCall said. “Now that you put Pokémon to it, people recognize it. It becomes fun. That’s why the storyline is so important. We have to find intersections between stories and technology.”
It has become easier to convince attendees to download event-specific apps and put on a high-tech headset in order to view a virtual product or presentation, he said, but marketers must build experiences that reward these activities and can be shared with a broader audience.
Philip Black, senior strategist in the Chicago office of B2B marketing agency Omobono, said advances in technology increasingly are making it easier to share augmented and virtual reality experiences. Companies can, for example, create virtual experiences that play well through a pricey Oculus Rift but that can then be pared down and repackaged for an everyman’s frame such as Google Cardboard.
“We’ve seen a ton of interest,” Black said. The agency has invested in augmented and virtual reality technologies, snagging access to a developer edition of Microsoft HoloLens and building a team familiar with the new capabilities currently moving into the marketplace.
The ability to share content helps push these experiences past the novelty phase, Black said. It also should put virtual and augmented reality squarely on the radar of marketers promoting products in the complex buying environment of B2B. “It allows you to make intangible products tangible,” he said. “And it enables shared learning.”
The CEB published a study showing that more than five buyers are involved in the average B2B purchase. As augmented and virtual reality experiences become more accessible, Black said, a buyer leaving a trade show can take a presentation back to the other four or so buyers languishing in the office.
“If you can put together VR and AR experiential learning about a deal and share it, then everyone will be learning together,” Black said. “That’s going to be huge for B2B.”
However, marketers need to be careful about how they apply these emerging technologies, said Anthony Murray, a partner at design studio The Third Fate, which builds virtual experiences to help architectural and construction firms present ideas to clients.
As the novelty factor wears off, people increasingly expect these technologies to deliver streamlined, useful content.
“There is a lot of gratuitous stuff out there,” Murray said. “We tend to be strategy based and develop technology solutions around [a business need], like if you need to take someone somewhere that they cannot go in the real world. Find a problem that can be fixed.”
Photo of Pokemon GO screen courtesy of Eduardo Woo via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
