Dive Brief:
- Publishers have embraced virtual reality content as a new media-rich format, but aren’t ready to expend too many resources for VR advertising.
- Meanwhile, Facebook bought VR tech firm Oculus Rift last year and has been nudging advertisers toward a VR world. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he believes the technology will follow the path of the smartphone from slow early adoption to ubiquity.
- One set of marketers who might benefit from VR advertising early on are B2B marketers given the complex sale of big ticket items that require more immersive “test drives” and media rich informational content.
Dive Insight:
Publishers are taking advantage of virtual reality, for example Discovery is creating weekly content for its VR app, and others are creating VR content, but for now it’s not a priority and not viewed as a serious ad format.
Tom Standage, deputy editor of The Economist, told Digiday, “I don’t think the tools are mature enough and demand is still uncertain among both readers and advertisers. This is a bit like the way the Web was in 1994: primitive, but promising.”
An agency executive who has spoken with Facebook about VR told Digiday, “They’re finally getting around to getting to what Oculus means in the grand scheme. It’s come up in pitch situations where they say they want us to use it for big brand launches.”
Fashion is another business that has been an early adopter of VR technology, using it to virtually transport fans to runway shows around the globe. "The possibilities for VR to revolutionize the fashion industry are endless," Jaunt's VP of Marketing Communications Miles Perkins told Racked.
And though fashion and tech designers alike see it as the early days of adoption and invention, the response from the fashion crowd has been overall favorable.
"It's important that we are allowing as many people as possible to experience VR for the first time," Aaron Luber, head of partnerships for VR at Google, told Racked. Luber explained that this time period provides "the building blocks to get people of all ages excited about new content formats and ways of seeings things."
