Could AR represent a new frontier for PR and Communications?

For many years now, social media has enabled us to start dialogue with our audiences and to turn our biggest naysayers into advocates.

We are all learning that consumers today are belief-driven buyers (think Gillette and Nike's latest "woke" ads). Sixty-four percent of respondents in the 2018 Earned Brand study by Edelman showed that consumers are buying from or boycotting brands based on the company's stance on a social or political issue. They want brands to stand up on issues that matter to them.

This change should be no news for brands. It’s been said that its time we left PR behind. We live in a world where our audiences don’t believe our position papers, our press releases, just because we publish them. They believe us when our words match our actions.

This is where Augmented Reality (AR) could represent that blurred boundary between "real" life and digital, making it a new frontier for PR and communications. So to learn more, I turned to Helen Papagiannis, an internationally recognised leading expert in AR. Her work spans over a decade in the field as a researcher, designer, and technology evangelist.

SK: What is some of the notable work you have seen AR help achieve?

HP: AR is a new communication medium and it is transforming the way we tell stories. It can even help tell untold stories. Notable Women is an AR app that highlights 100 historic women selected from the Teachers Righting History database, a collection of women whom the American people recommended to appear on the U.S. currency. The Notable Women AR app — developed by Nexus Studios — was inspired by the question, “What if anyone could learn about women who made U.S. history in a place where they’ve historically been left out?” You can try the app yourself with any denomination of US currency.

SK: Last time we met, you mentioned that “Technology is here, it’s going to be all about experiences.” Can you elaborate on that?

HP: I wrote Augmented Human because I began to witness a much needed shift from a focus on the technology alone to a push toward creating compelling content and meaningful experiences in AR. As the technology advances, we must ask: How can we design AR experiences to enhance and make a user’s life easier and better? MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte said, “Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.” AR is no longer just about the technology, it’s about living in the real world, and creating magical and meaningful experiences that are human-centered. My keynote speeches and book are about exploring these big ideas and the extraordinary new reality AR affords. Now is the time to dream, design, and build our wondrous future.

SK: Are their ethical repercussions - as annoying and inescapable as traditional advertisement are in public spaces (billboards, etc)? Could things get worse if AR enables ads to appear in front of our eyeballs: is this a future we really want?! So can we acknowledge that every tech development has its negative side?

HP: In my keynote at Shift, I mentioned Keichii Matsuda’s video Hyper-Reality where the city is saturated in media and advertising. Kudos to Matsuda for showing us a future that we don’t want. In Augmented Human I reference artist Julian Oliver’s work, The Artvertiser developed in collaboration with Damian Stewart and Arturo Castro in 2008. The Artvertiser is a software platform that replaces billboards with art in real-time. It works by teaching computers to recognize advertisements, which are then transformed into a virtual canvas upon which artists can exhibit images or video. The Artvertiser applies a subversive approach to reveal and temporarily intercept environments that are dominated by advertising.

SK: What is your message to those who are not yet convinced of the value of AR?

HP: AR can help us translate the world around us from experiences like Google Translate on a smartphone (which I used to help me translate Dutch while I was in Belgium) to assistive tech like OrCam and Seeing AI for people who have low vision or are blind. AR is a new medium and the way forward is to continue to build experiences that enrich and benefit humanity. Let’s make this our collective goal.

So does this mean that to some extent we communicators need to become technologists as well? We like it or not, we are all technologists today. Social media channels were the start. Integrations of consumer-grade technologies such as Workplace by Facebook, Spencer have become a must to facilitate customer-centric, society-first experiences.

For corporate activists amongst us, we have taken advantage of all that social has to offer. Today, AR can represent that evolution where PR and communications delivers outcomes than simply outputs.