When did you last update your sense of reality?

NHS Blood and Transplant recently launched its first ever augmented reality billboard campaign, aimed at educating people about the benefits of blood donations and dispelling the stigma and stress that many face around giving blood. Debuting on major advertising screens in London and Birmingham, NHS volunteers stand by to offer members of the public an opportunity to see in real-time the benefits of their donation. Using augmented reality through iPhones and tablets, participants can virtually give blood to a patient on the billboard screen. As the blood bag fills up, participants can see the patient grows from sick to healthy. Utilising this interactive technology, the NHS has tapped into what promises to be the new way to communicate with consumers.

Augmented Reality (AR) along with Virtual Reality (VR) technologies (think IKEAs AR Catalogue and Tilt Brush by Google) are quickly becoming a popularised method of creative communication for businesses and creative agencies. At P&P, AR and VR have crept their way into many a creative brainstorming session (we’re currently working on an exciting VR experience for an upcoming exhibition). During these sessions, the conversation tends to end up like this – ‘Yep. Amazing technology. Fantastic way to engage with our audience. But, will they get it?’

In the same way agencies work to manage clients’ expectations, we must also manage consumers’ expectations and answer the question – ‘will this be accessible to our audience?’ While it’s wonderful to implement cutting-edge communication tools to present information in a new and engaging way, if your audience has never heard of AR or VR, will a campaign utilising those technologies be affected, or worse yet, will your message be lost completely?  Should we underestimate our audience and play it safe, or take a bit of a risk with something like AR or VR to potentially produce a brilliant and genuinely innovative campaign?

Using our 4D process we believe that brilliant, out of the box campaigns utilising technology like AR and VR that delivers greater creativity, innovation and results is absolutely achievable –  the only frontier for campaigns is our imagination. Looking forward, AR and VR could completely change the game in terms of how we as consumers interact with products and marketing, as well as how we as agencies think of campaigns and end-consumer communication mediums.

We’re willing to take the risk – are you?

Have you seen the NHS Blood and Transplant campaign and thought of a way your business can incorporate AR or VR technology into your next project? We’d love to hear your ideas and show you our process for building more creative, brand building briefs. So please, do get in touch at [email protected].