Virtual reality (VR) is a $14.84 billion dollar market, and it's getting bigger.
Meta recently released VR headset prototypes for its long-proclaimed virtual "Metaverse." Apple is recruiting Hollywood directors to create video content for its VR headset with an anticipated release in 2023. TikTok's ByteDance is ramping up for VR investment. And debate has already begun about Meta's decision to charge for VR apps.
It's hard to miss the tide of technology moving closer and closer to virtual reality. Soon, most big tech companies and even smaller players will want their own stake in the game. As with the dot-com bubble burst, the explosion of social media, and the advent of OTT streaming, brands will need to adapt their advertising to virtual reality.
Advertising and marketing build brands primarily by generating "mental availability," or the likelihood that your target customer will be able to remember your brand and product at the point of sale or decision.
Mental availability is all about reach, frequency, and salience.
Brands must consider how broad their audience reach is, because being seen by more people has been shown to be more effective than precise targeting. Virtual reality and virtual worlds broaden a brand's audience. Added touches in virtual reality and virtual worlds mean added frequency of interactions, and more exposures per audience member mean higher mental availability.
For those reasons, salience as it applies to advertising in virtual reality can be thought of as relevance plus attention-grabbing. If a tree falls on you and you don't notice that it did, are you still flat? If you are in a place, real or virtual, and there's an ad, but it doesn't get your attention, did it have an effect?
In three dimensions—movement, interaction-rules, and the novelty of virtual spaces—salience is likely to be very high, and it's time for marketers to start taking advantage of it.
Virtual Reality and Customer Behavior
Life is a three-dimensional (or four-dimensional, if you include time) interactive, immersive experience. Target audiences have evolved to learn experientially in this environment. Most advertising to date has had to rely on media that telescopes experience down to one or two senses and dimensions.
Although the imagination can build a full reality from limited sensory information (think of families sitting around a radio at night before the age of television), more immersive is more emotional, and more "real" is more persuasive. Thus, advertising in virtual worlds and through virtual reality ought to be the most powerful advertising to be invented.
Advertising and marketing campaigns in a virtual world can go from conventional to completely unconventional. Brands could opt for virtual reality billboards in video games or instant virtual clothes fittings and furniture trials.
Or, companies could go even further, creating advertising or marketing campaigns that are a whole 360 experience. Imagine: Instead of a Geico commercial, the Geico Gecko performs a live performance right in front of you and shakes your hand. The possibilities are endless.
Such changes in advertising lead to a brand's customers' adopting new behaviors, including brand loyalties, which—as advertising often is, or should be—is a behavior-change process. Behavior change then drives personal motivation to achieve, and drives momentum to do something in the moments that matter most to our individual selves.
