Welcome to the Immersive Age: the Third Era of Marketing

NOTE: this post originally appeared on my blog, What's Next is Everything.

Rapidly changing technology often wreaks havoc on business in two primary ways:

1. it changes consumer expectations, often in unexpected ways, forcing companies to adapt to those new expectations quickly; and
2. it gifts companies with a wide array of potential new capabilities.?

These are two sides of the same coin, of course - and the convergence occasionally creates a profound paradigm shift that fundamentally changes how companies do business and engage with their customers and prospects.

I believe we are at the beginning of one of those paradigm shifts - namely a new era of marketing creativity that I call the Immersive Age. This era follows the Analog and Interactive ages that came before it. Let's review how we got here and what it means for brands moving forward.

The first age: Analog

This era of marketing was characterized by the dominance of one-to-many messaging, in which brands would typically create a single message (or a campaign theme that manifested across multiple ads but laddered up to a singular theme). These ads would get pushed out via channels such as print, radio, TV, direct mail and out-of-home. With the exception of direct mail, very little opportunity for creative personalization existed - the vast majority of consumers would see the same message.

These channels, and the creative delivered therein, are largely passive in nature; meaning there was no inherent way for a user to interact directly or immediately. Industry visionaries like Howard Gossage and David Ogilvy would preach the benefits of getting people involved in the ads, but were forced to resort to workarounds like return mail or 1-800 numbers - vehicles that enabled a user to respond but lacked immediate inherent interactivity.

Everyone has their favorite ads from this period, but there are two examples from TV that are often cited as among the best ads ever made: Coca Cola's "Hilltop" and Apple's "1984."

Mass reach, mass messaging, and broadcast communications were the dominant features of this era.

The second age: Interactive

With the birth of the personal computer, and soon after - the internet - along came the Interactive age of marketing.? Suddenly, brands could interact with their audiences in ways that were previously impossible. They could create targeted messaging and tailor their campaigns to specific groups of people based on their interests and behaviors. They could also track user engagement and use this data to refine their messaging and improve their campaigns over time. Some of these benefits are now under threat thanks to a rapidly changing privacy landscape that features both platforms and regulations causing major shifts to targeting and measurement. But the core capability of inherent interactivity remains a key component. And I believe we're actually seeing an interactive creative renaissance that focuses on smart interaction as a foil to signal loss caused by privacy changes.

Interactive marketing initially enabled basic interactivity like clicking on ads, but it quickly evolved to include richer interactions between brands and their target audiences. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter enabled brands to engage with their followers in real-time, while email marketing allowed them to deliver personalized messaging directly to their customers' inboxes.

A few great examples from this era would include:

• Real time interaction - Smart Car's "poop tweet," which was done by some brilliant colleagues during my time at Razorfish. To be clear, I had almost nothing to do with it, but took great pride in showing that case study video in nearly every pitch for the next year.
• Subservient Chicken - a brilliant campaign for Burger King that would not have been possible in the Analog age.
• Honda the other side - an interactive story that enables the viewer to select which perspective they'd like to watch from in real time.

What is really interesting - and brilliant - about those examples is that they started first as a compelling interactive idea that then had legs into other channels, including analog media and earned media via "viral" distribution and mainstream press coverage.

The Third Age: Immersive

We are standing on the precipice of a great new era of marketing - the Immersive Age. Fueled by a convergence of many disruptive technologies (AR/VR/AI/5G/blockchain/Web3 etc.) hitting at roughly the same time, this era takes everything we learned from the interactive age and turns it to 11 while also enabling brands with what can at times be an overwhelming new canvas of opportunity. Astute readers may note that I've as yet avoided the word "metaverse" - this is intentional, but not because I'm a non-believer. On the contrary, I'm?excited by the metaverse but I try very hard to temper my tech enthusiasm with a dose of realism. And it seems like we have a very long way to go with a myriad of technical, legal, regulatory, ethical and commercial concerns before we are able to unlock the full metaverse vision.

That said, the building blocks of a fully immersive meataverse exist today, and for me Augmented Reality is the first fully scaled and accessible building block. Apple CEO Tim Cook has long been a vocal supporter of AR. One such recent quote: “I think AR is a profound technology that will affect everything.? In the not-too-distant future, we are going to look back and think about how we once lived without AR.”

Some would argue that the full potential of AR will only be unlocked by everyday wearable AR glasses, and I would agree that this will undoubtedly be a major advancement in human-computer interaction. But smartphone-based web AR is highly capable today and can be accessed by most modern smartphones using only a browser. 8th Wall estimates that there are 5 BILLION such devices on the planet today.

App-based AR, including and especially in the social platforms, also has tremendous scale. Snap recently revealed that it has more than 250+ million daily lens users who engage 6 billion times per day collectively, and 5 trillion times cumulatively.

The immersive age of marketing will enable brands to go beyond communicating to and interacting with their target audiences. It will empower brands to envelop their audiences in new types of experiences that can activate multiple senses simultaneously, light up different parts of the brain, and create much deeper memories and connections than most work from the analog or interactive eras.

In future posts, we'll dig into strategic best practices for immersive creative, but meantime here are a few examples:

• Broadway League "Show Globe" - A really fun AR piece aimed at welcoming fans back to Broadway theaters after the long closure due to COVID-19. Each of the show tiles featured a custom-recorded greeting from the cast/crew of the show that you could not get anywhere else.
• Coca-Cola's "Create Real Magic" campaign - invites people to create digital art by using artificial intelligence tools and Coke icons, with an eye on the brand selecting the best pieces to adorn billboards in New York and London.
• Kind Snacks - launched multiple digital activations promoting sustainability, including AR lenses in Snapchat.

More examples can be found via our browse by tag page here.

Conclusion

Marketing has come a long way since the analog era, and we are now at the beginning of a new era of immersive marketing. Brands that embrace new technologies like augmented and virtual reality, generative AI, and more will be well-positioned to create highly personalized, engaging and effective experiences for their audiences. The era of immersive marketing promises to be an exciting time for marketers and consumers alike, and I can't wait to see what the future holds.

Check out What's Next is Everything for additional points of view on emerging technology for marketing, an ever-growing catalog featuring examples of brands using emerging tech, and curated news and data.