The digital ad industry is going through some big changes. From the pending disappearance of third party cookies to Apple rewriting the playbook on privacy and security, it’s a challenging time to be in advertising. But with challenges also comes opportunity and there’s plenty of opportunity to be had in an industry where ad spend is expected to grow into hundreds of billions dollars annually and brands are continually challenged to break through in a digitally cluttered world.

One area that’s seeing tremendous growth is immersive advertising and marketing.  With the advent of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality, a sci-fi future of consumers engaged with immersed or extended realities as part of their everyday life is not so far off. Smartphones and Covid are accelerating the transition from our 2D media world to a 3D media world by fast forwarding our digital transformation (and dependency) and our reliance on mobile devices. Today’s smartphones have enough sensors to easily be one of the most versatile and powerful objects you own. Immersive media interacts with these sensors enabling advertisers to engage with consumers in new and powerful ways, ultimately driving ad campaign results.

Immersive media and device sensors are not only more effective at grabbing consumer attention but they also mean advertisers may no longer be dependent on the click to know if and how consumers are engaging with their brand. But, however future forward AR, VR, and MR are, there are other reasons why marketers should be including immersive advertising in their media plans right now. 

1) Ad blindness - Each year advertisers spend more and more money to reach fewer eyeballs because consumers are becoming numb, or “blind”, to standard display ads and video ads. They either simply ignore them, stare at the “skip” button, or don’t even recognize the ads are there.

With a Nielsen study indicating immersive ads are as much as 300% more engaging than even video, one must conclude that it’s worthwhile to allocate at least a fraction of ordinary display ad budgets to immersive advertising alternatives. But there’s more than studies showing the effectiveness of branded immersive media, there’s plenty of evidence in the form of actual immersive ad campaigns that have shown repeatedly that immersive display ads are much more effective at triggering and holding consumer attention. 

Rich media display ads that feature immersive media give consumers the control and freedom to explore at their command. This tends to increase dwell time, and not just passive dwell time like watching a video, it drives what can be called “active dwell time”. This is active time spent with brand where the consumer is choosing to engage with a brand, they’re looking at what they want to look at, in the way they want to look at it (full screen, portrait, landscape, vr-mode, ar-mode, etc) and in the order and manner of their choosing. This is truly game-changing and it helps advertisers of all sizes to get the upper hand in the battle of ad blindness.

 2) Ad Fraud - It’s no secret that the ad industry has a trust problem, and while we may think we’re not the direct recipients of the wrath of ad fraud criminals, all of us in the advertising ecosystem, from the advertiser to the publisher to the consumer, pay for the misdeeds of others. So as fraud attempts to wreak havoc on digital advertising, immersive ads that are driven by motion sensor technology appear on the horizon as a potential way to help remedy the problem. 

Immersive display ads can be built with a lot of intelligence inside. The kind that can discriminate between a human and a bot. The kind that can tell if an ad was ever in front of a human and the kind that can tell how a person engaged with an ad, even if they never touched or clicked on it. Fraudulent bot clicks are estimated to account for anywhere from 15% to 25% of all ad click-throughs and cost advertisers billions annually. The ability of immersive display ads to tell the difference between a human versus an attack from a click farm gives advertisers added assurance that their message is being seen and engaged with by real people.

3) Ad Performance Control - Currently, the ability to gauge the performance of your ad is either largely based on the number of clicks (real or false) an ad receives or attribution studies conducted several weeks, or even months, after the ad campaign run. Dynamic creative optimization has been able to provide some advertisers with additional tools to manage ad performance in real-time, but with immersive advertising, brands and media buyers have a whole new set of real-time tools at their disposal. 

With immersive ads, we can use sensor data to identify within hours if a campaign is working simply by looking at how real people are engaging with the brand. This active time spent with the brand is invaluable because research has shown that attention is a strong proxy for sales and it also delivers new brand intelligence. With immersive ads, brands have all new actionable insights into how consumers actually engage with their brand. These insights can be used within hours of going live and throughout the entire flight of the campaign to continually optimize ad performance and for market learnings. It provides advertisers with a new window into valuable consumer behavior.

4) No More 3rd Party Cookies! New policies blocking use of third-party cookies and other tracking data is making it harder to target consumers. Immersive advertising doesn’t need to rely on cookies or collect any privacy protected information and can often help marketers target and re-target just as well or better than cookies. In the case of immersive ads, retargeting can be based on how the consumer engaged with a brand, ie., did they look at the red or blue car? The sneakers or the pumps? The leading lady or her co-star? How long did they look at them? What else did they look at? How did they engage? Etc.

As third-party data leaves the scene, all new opportunities arise for first-party data. As you can probably guess, when you combine a brand’s first-party data with the engagement tracking of immersive ads you have what could be considered ad magic. You have the ability to match a consumer’s interests and intent with the ads they’re served, thereby enhancing the entire content consumption experience. You become incredibly closer to marketing nirvana, where you’re delivering the right message, in the right way, at the right time, to the right person. It’s a world where the consumer has control of the ad experience but also one where ad campaigns have a higher return on ad spend. It’s a world where all parties involved are behaving symbiotically and thereby all parties win.

As we're rapidly learning, our dependence on digital content is only going to increase as we discover the many ways in which our lives can be enhanced with more immersive experiences. To survive, brands must learn how to connect with consumers in this new world. The transition to immersive isn’t as far off as one might think and marketers who are actively seeking out Immersive Advertising Technology now will be the ones who survive the great 4th Transformation of Technology.

Want to know more about immersive advertising and how it could help you? Feel free to contact me directly at rbruza@advrtas.com or visit ADVRTAS.com .