According to a new report from VRJournal, marketing – mobile and otherwise – may be on the precipice of the age of virtual reality.
Citing new data from eMarketer, it seems marketing is ready for the full VR treatment.
“Marketers have a new medium—the immersive medium—that they can use to tell stories and engage with audiences in ways like never before,” reports eMarketer.
In “Virtual Reality and Beyond: The Current State and Future Potential of Immersive Digital Marketing Experiences,” eMarketer notes that VR “completely immerses a user inside a virtual world or experience, typically through the use of a head-mounted display (HMD) that is often connected to headphones, controllers and other peripherals that let users navigate through that experience. A key characteristic of a great VR experience is the feeling of “presence”—users feel like they are truly in the synthetic environment being presented.”
As VRJournal notes, that is potential marketing gold.
“One key reason why there‘s so much confidence in the future of the immersive medium is the scale of investment that has flowed into companies creating VR and AR products over the past few years,” the report summary explains. “Long before Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion in March 2014, the VR system developer had raised $2.4 million through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign—far exceeding its original goal of $250,000 and indicating a strong interest among internet users in finally experiencing high-quality VR in the comfort of their own home.”
And even though the technology just keeps on getting better, we probably “haven’t seen nuthin’ yet,” VRJournal’s Michael Brock writes. That’s especially true when one considers that from Q1 2014 to Q2 2015, more than $1 billion was invested across nearly 100 deals globally in this tech sector.
