Star Wars Gets Augmented Reality (AR)
Augmented reality has been around for a while now. It mainstreamed onto the scene with the Pokémon Go craze and it continues to grow as mobile phone companies are increasing their support, and beefing up the tech to be able create digital fantasylands over mobile. In case you’ve been busy at work, or living under a rock, Christmas is next week and the latest installment of Star Wars has just premiered. This event was huge as it the cult classic created buzz for months, naturally driving marketers to implement tech-savvy ideas for their marketing efforts!
Disney has recently partnered with Google to create an augmented reality sticker pack scheduled to launch exclusively on Google’s Pixel and Pixel 2 mobile devices. If you are unaware of what sticker packs are, they are fun images you can add to your social media posts via popular platforms, such as Snapchat and Instagram. Augmented reality elevates the sticker experience further by creating three-dimensional images that interact with your live environment allowing a user to become fully immersed in a fictional and fantasy wonderland.
For marketers like us, this unique digital tool allows us to be extremely creative in what we can produce and how we interact with people over digital cyberspace. Because AR is interactive with live environments it encourages people to create unique content in an array of spaces. People of all backgrounds worldwide help curate unique and refreshing marketing content that is highly shareable with peers. This form of interactive marketing engages people to become part of the marketing production and have a bit of fun doing it. Creating engaging AR campaigns where audiences can be part of the conversation and production helps marketing efforts stay relevant and can relieve a huge load off marketing budgets. This in turn gives some of the creativity back to the people and allows them to become fully engaged in the experience. AR is still in its infancy stages and is destined to become a digital standard in the marketing space.
As 2018 approaches, on the horizon and our culture becomes more tech-savvy and immersed in digital, we can bet that marketing will keep shifting in this direction. It’s an exciting time to be alive and to be a marketer, as we see new creative developments happen every day!