Applications of AR in Marketing

Is it the next big thing?

-Sidhant Satyajeet

Augmented Reality (AR) experience uses a camera to alter or improve the user's perception of the real environment While web-based access is also possible for this experience, app-based access is currently more frequent The use of augmented reality (AR) experiences is a novel technique to add experiences to real-world objects and qualities, such as location or recognizable images and objects

Consumer acceptance of AR started soon after the 2007 release of the iPhone. Particularly from a commercial standpoint, the story starts in 2008. When a webcam or smartphone camera was directed at a print advertisement for the Mini, it rendered a 3D image of the vehicle overlaid on the page. The next ten years saw a significant advancement of AR in marketing thanks to technological advancements that will be discussed later Up until around 2014, it was mainly used for branding "stunts" in public places, which usually involved cameras snapping pictures of people and their surroundings, adding virtual features, and then displaying them on a screen

This assisted in introducing and promoting AR as a marketing channel to a wider consumer base With the launch of Snap Lenses in 2015, AR exposure began to scale in real life. 30 million photos were embellished with Lenses in only the first year, including marketers With augmented reality, brands may finally reliably reach scale For instance, Taco Bell's Cinco de Mayo Shell Lens in 2016 received over 224 million views on the day it was released and was shared by millions of Snapchat users By 2018, over 70% of Snap users have used or viewed an augmented reality Lens every day on average Through Lens Studio, the Snap community developed over 300,000 Lenses, which received over 35 billion views

Then, in 2016, Pokémon Go launched, the most widely used AR application of all time, it has generated over $2 billion in revenue from in-app purchases and has been downloaded about 800 million times