The future is moving fast and you’re either with it or left behind. With technology still advancing, I feel like we are
no longer in that space where people are wondering how much more can a cellular p
hone do and can we reach its ultimate potential? Now, it’s more about how much more can phones and computers be compact, quick, and convenient, without having someone be static in one spot? While there are smart scientists in a lab somewhere trying to figure that out, another question we can ask is, how can we use all this information and apply it to engagement? Phones in 2021, can read Augmented and Virtual Reality using the tiniest cameras in the world. This is giving people a first-hand look at participating in big life events without actually being there. We are no longer relying on static ads to tell a story nor are we waiting for what a video is communicating because if there is nothing unique to the ad then it is not memorable and lacks a word of mouth to be shared.
Available To Anyone, Everywhere
Five years ago, saying you had a Virtual Reality set was a big deal! There wasn’t much available to use it with but the few things that were available expanded how advanced VR was and opened new doors for new opportunities. In 2021, VR is available in the palm of your hands and at a very cheap cost online. With it, the possibilities are never-ending with the help of platforms and not needing a multi-million dollar motion cap suit or cameras to experience what it has to offer. We have movies, video games, the internet itself, that want to make a digital human connection. Marketers are jumping on this trend because with this medium, you can create a new wave of story-telling and be the innovator to lead the way for others to follow.
In 2017, Google won an Emmy award for Outstanding Innovation In Interactive Storytelling for their Short Animated film “Pearl”. What was so unique? The first 360 fully immersed animated short where you can use your phone to open a portal to this beautiful story, frame by frame, that lets you be part of the protagonist’s story. This short is widely available for free on
Google Spotlight Stories, a platform that collaborates with artists today to create these beautifully animated stories that are not like others. An animated storybook to really let our imaginations really run wild in a vast space and virally share with others. Using this platform, movies also used this concept to give a tour of behind the scenes of different animated films building this immersive marketing where you, the viewer, can also be part of the behind the scenes all while bringing exposure to the animation studio and the featured film. The image depicted above is a Google Spotlight Stories promo for Wes Anderson’s, “Isle of Dogs” for a behind-scenes interview with the main characters, the dogs, while the crew is setting up and building sets around them. But, does this mean that the act of storytelling as marketers do with a regular tv commercial going to be substituted predominately with Virtual Reality Storytelling?
Virtual Reality vs Reality
One of my favorite short films by Keiichi Matsuda, bases this future of ads where we only can live life in an augmented world because if not, we will be bored.
Or perhaps, we will be asking ourselves what is our purpose because we are torn between what is real and what isn’t. Similar to us now, where we can’t spend a minute off of our phones and the moment we lose connection, we freak out. And while that idea is not TOO far into the future, do marketers think of how to entertain and story-tell when virtual reality will become a social norm? How will people get used to it? In the meantime, marketers should focus on how to engage with people again to remind them that there is still someone behind these ads and commercials and make more compelling stories because no one can ever stray away from relatable emotions.
Creating these spaces is not just solely for entertainment but marketers are jumping the Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality train to be something different and to be a different conversation when it’s being shared word of mouth. Something marketers are straying away from is the human connection because they are too focused on the Digital one. How can someone target me, a viewer, and the barrier between a marketer and the phone in my hands? While there are “human connection” ads, I think in the digital age that we are moving in now, Virtual Reality is a nice change to story-telling and creating new innovative ways but I feel it will get old very fast or quickly become a Black Mirror episode where the technology will backfire due to the convenience and the concept that there must something around us twenty-four, seven. Or perhaps, we won’t need the minds of a marketing team to deliver what people want to see because algorithms will figure it out faster? Open questions with never-ending answers. The future, as usual, is futile.
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