If you’ve seen Altered Carbon or Blade Runner 2049, you’ve seen Hollywood’s vision of virtual reality and marketing working together. It’s big, bright, in your face, and impossible to ignore. It engages with you on a personal and visceral level, using the A.I. modern-day marketers can only fantasize about. While the technology isn’t there yet, it’s safe to assume it’s on the horizon. In fact, the projected economic impact of VR and AR technologies is expected to reach between 5 and 30 billion US Dollars worldwide by 2020. And, with large companies like Samsung and Facebook making huge investments into the technology, it’s clear VR is coming － for real this time.
The Advantages of VR
It’s easy to see why marketers are excited about virtual reality. VR presents the opportunity to explore completely new marketing strategies. While other digital marketing channels become stale and saturated over time, VR is fresh and exciting. Look at Volvo’s VR test drive of the XC90 SUV. When the car wasn’t showroom ready, Volvo used VR to allow people to ‘test drive’ it ahead of time.
Like me, you might be wondering, ‘what’s the point of a virtual test drive’, but the results speak for themselves. The campaign garnered over 238 million PR impressions, 159 million paid media impressions, 19 million social media impressions, nearly 4 million video views, 24 earned news stories, and a half-million web page views. Most importantly, the entire run of first edition XC90s sold out in less than two days.
,
Source: Business 2 Community