Augmented reality has been around for a good few years but it’s only with the growing penetration of smart phones and tablets that it’s moving from a fancy gimmick to a powerful new advertising medium. Lynx’s Angels Will Fall campaign that took over video billboards in Australia and the UK was achieved the fabled viral effect, with thousands of people viewing the You-Tube videos even if they didn’t see the campaign live.
Today I was in a meeting with a man from the start-up Blippar. Blippar is a new London based company elbowing their way into the field of Augmented Reality, and their app is an innovative product in a very competitive market. They may be small but they’ve got global plans and they’ve already produced campaigns for big players including Waitrose, Cadburys and Heinz.
My problem with AR in the past has been that it’s very cool but very difficult to convince clients of the tangible gains they’ll get from it. At the moment it’s all focused on the social, on raising brand awareness and this mostly seems to consist of getting Likes on Facebook.
What Blippar are offering is a new advertising platform, and trying to get brands to run campaigns through their app, or as they put it, to be the Facebook or Twitter equivalent for AR. Once a user has downloaded the Blippar app they can interact with all the campaigns run through Blippar, creating a growing user base with every new advert run. This, to me, is a much stronger idea than creating bespoke apps for every client which always suffer from the step of convincing people to download the app in the first place.
I was impressed by the ambition the Blippar team seem to have, and their willingness to work with other agencies to push forward new ideas. They’ve also put a lot of thought into that most useful of digital traits, data-capture, with full analytics as part of any campaign run through their app. I’m very excited to see what happens for them in the next year.
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