Re-Inventing Advertising: Creating a Mixed Reality Experience

Advertising is more crucial than ever in many media companies, despite the old traditional ways no longer cutting it. A mixed reality experience is the today's standard with numerous screens being available for people to watch content from.

Despite these changes, it hasn't changed the fundamental system behind media advertising. You still need to advertise to make money. Plus, advertising is still expensive as it's been for decades.

One thing also consistent is most viewers hate advertising, making it necessary to use different approaches in the multi-screen universe.

Defining the Mixed Reality Experience

If you've been working in media for a while, you likely remember the days when everyone would mostly watch the same things on one TV screen. Starting in the 1970s, the only competition to television was video games, especially families owning gaming consoles like Atari.

In those days, there were no means to advertise on such a format. Not until the cable era did advertising have a chance to expand beyond the old three-network universe.

By the 1990s, the internet started to change things, despite media advertising being limited there until well into the 2000s.

It's only been within the last ten years where we've truly seen the mixed reality universe come about. With mobile screens, and even different forms of pay TV services, 21st century advertising has to change to a more targeted format.

Creating More Relevant Ads With Analytics

Your own media company may have some relationships with content distributors or various data technologies. Tapping into the use of analytics is more important than ever, because it's here where you'll be able to address advertising in a fresh way.

Gaining access to more targeted analytics is the key, something becoming increasingly possible thanks to the use of AI and machine learning.

Machine learning is going to study what the viewing habits are of your viewers and come up with a predictive model for what kind of advertising they prefer.

Keep in mind this works well even for those who hate advertising. With a smarter approach to placing ads, it might change the minds of those who don't want to see a single ad when watching content.

Reducing Ad Loads and Making Them More Relevant

At stake here is being able to reduce how many ads you present in a given hour and broadcast ones with more value during specific times of the day.

Analytics will tell you when your viewers watch specific content during their most attentive moments. Having access to advanced analytics is going to show you exactly when your audience watches a specific type of content on different devices.

In other words, you'll know when they're watching something on their smartphone, a laptop, or on traditional TV.

What makes this so important is most people now watch content on all of these devices at once.

Reaching People on Myriad Devices

Some of you may think of mixed reality as adding VR and video games into the mix. These obviously should have serious consideration since a sizable portion of the population are using these as well on any given day.

Even so, standard devices from TV to tablets often integrate when it comes to watching content. Many people now use these together for both information and entertainment. For instance, social media continues being used by TV watchers for live commentary while watching something on television.

Because of this cross-screen sensibility, advertising needs to address all devices together. With transitional and simultaneous use possible, one targeted ad could appear on one device while content appears on another device later.

Integrating advertising in a thoroughly targeted way is the future of advertising. AI and machine learning will become the technologies that help design the analytics to get there.

Visit our website to learn how we can bring these technologies to your media company.