Mobile Marketing Platforms: A/V Reality and Location Marketing

Augmented Reality

When it comes to augmented reality, we're looking at something that has found more success in the consumer space when compared to virtual reality. Augmented Reality is the process of overlaying digital objects over the real world to give the illusion that the object is physical. Advertisers use it to make their product look 3D, giving the viewer a sense of how it will look in real life, and in some examples the exact shape of it. Using a mobile application, a mobile phone's camera identifies and interprets a marker, often a black and white barcode image. The software analyses the marker and creates a virtual image overlay on the mobile phone's screen, tied to the position of the camera. This means the app works with the camera to interpret the angles and distance the mobile phone is away from the marker.

Examples of Augmented Reality

Anatomy 4D (Android, IOS) is a medical mobile app that allows the viewer to print out a fact sheet and then scan their phone to create an augmented organ and whole human body seemingly rise from the page.

Star Walk (Android, IOS) is an app which works particularly well on tablets. The viewer can hold the device up towards the sky and a sky map of constellations will appear on the device.

Virtual Reality

This is the creation of a world that the viewer can interact with, mostly used with VR helmet or goggles such as the Oculus Rift. In this type of reality, viewers are isolated in the world, whereas in Augmented Reality they are in touch with this world.

Examples of Virtual Reality

Google has recently launched its virtual reality camera app, where the camera takes a 3D image, and the viewer has to wear a cardboard headset to see the picture as if they were standing in front of it. The company isn’t planning to sell the headsets themselves, this would be done by an outside company, and this app is only available for Android phones but will be rolling out to iPhones.

Location-Based (Near Field) Mobile Marketing

Location based marketing allows brands to adapt their marketing message based on where consumers are geographically. The proximity of stores is an influencing factor whether a customer chooses that particular brand over another, so this type of marketing gives the company a better advantage than competitors.

Examples of Location-Based Mobile Marketing

BlueBrain is a music group in America which changes the songs a consumer is listening to depending on moods, which are dependent on which location that consumer is in. Certain landmarks have different moods, for example New York Central Park.

Coca-Cola sent information to Japanese tea drinkers on where the nearest vending machine is that stocks their favourite drinks, for effective location-aware marketing.