The Opportunity for Brand Engagement on Mobile

by | Mar 22, 2018 | 360 VR

Header for 360 VR Ads Deliver Opportunities
Banner blindness. It’s been something the ad industry has been battling for a number of years. In fact, according to ad display benchmarks, the interaction rate for a standard 300×250 ad is approximately 1.74%. That’s not a lot of people interacting with an ad, especially when you consider that brands shell out thousands, in some cases millions, of dollars just to get people to engage with their brands.

Given that 1.74% is the average digital ad interaction rate, anything significantly higher than this should be lauded by brands and the ad industry. Fortunately, thanks to advancements in immersive media, the ad industry has something to be excited about. The reality is that there is already an ad format that can exist just about anywhere you would run a traditional display ad (on browsers & in-app). It can be delivered to just about every smartphone (more than 3 billion!), desktop and tablet across the globe and achieves engagement rates well above 1.74%. This new ad format is the 360 VR ad unit.

After delivering millions of impressions, our 360 VR ad units have seen engagement rates averaging from 30% to upwards of 65-85%. That’s why we were flabbergasted when we saw a headline stating consumers were “overwhelmed” by 360 video or weren’t sure what to do with it. This misleading headline was a response to a recently released 360 branded video study and it is missing the bigger point. 360 VR ads (which can be more than just 360 video) deliver engagement rates that have never been seen before in the online ad space. Consequently, we find it timely to clear the air.

Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater

The study we refer to was done in the United States with a sample size just under 3,000. Of all those respondents, 38% of them didn’t know what to do with the 360 video. Do we need to point out the obvious here: that more than 60% did know how to interact with a branded 360 video? That’s great news and means that those high engagement rates we referred to earlier will only go up as more people learn how to play with a 360 ad. And the fact that 38% of those in the study didn’t know what to do represents an opportunity for all of us in the 360 VR ad space to educate the market and improve on this emerging ad format.

“There are no problems – only opportunities to be creative.” – Dorye Roettger

As for Advrtas and our 360 VR ad units, our product development team has studied and tested many different ways to be able to get people to initially engage with a 360 VR ad while simultaneously showing them how to interact with it. We’ve accomplished this by leveraging things such as 360 icons, visual cues like arrows or text that say “Move me”, and even using camera auto rotate to catch the eye.

Progressive Insurance 360 VR Ad 360 Icon Version 1
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Once a consumer has initially engaged with the 360 VR ad, there are additional visual (and sometimes even audio) cues that will help sustain the consumer’s engagement. An example is animation that moves across the 360 VR ad, which encourages people to follow the animation with their device movement. Aside from that, there are other ways to encourage people to look around and explore 360 VR ads. That’s why for a headline to say that consumers aren’t sure what to do with 360 video while misleadingly implying that this applies to a majority of consumers, misses the bigger opportunity that with some consumer education, this so-called problem can be turned into a positive.

360 VR Ads…More than 360 Video

As to the headline that emphasized on consumers finding 360 video overwhelming, this is an exaggeration of the facts. The fact is that more than 70% of respondents in the aforementioned study did not find 360 video overwhelming.

Another point worth highlighting is that if brands constantly focus on 360 video, they’re missing another big opportunity to leverage 360 VR for advertising because 360 VR ad formats aren’t just limited to 360 videos.

360 VR advertising offers brands a spherical ad canvas that has exponentially more space in which to communicate a message through several ways. By way of 360 video, 360 images, and by way of creating an environment within a sphere that incorporates 2D images and 360 imagery for background.

One issue with 360 video is time constraint, which might not allow consumers a chance to look around at everything. This understandably makes exploring a 360 video in 30 seconds or less, feel overwhelming. That’s why opting to use 360 and 2D images instead can be more effective as the consumer has the ability to explore the ad at their own pace. Consumers aren’t as overwhelmed when they feel like they’re in control.

Why Does All This Engagement Matter?

As marketers, having a consumer engage with your brand is something that we work towards every day. The more people who engage, the more people you can convert to customers. Brand engagement helps to develop brand affinity, aids in brand recall and helps drive intent to purchase. Further, it can trigger and evoke certain emotions within consumers that they will from then on associate with your brand.

“360 VR advertising represents an unprecedented opportunity to have consumers engage with brands at scale.”
Even more advantageous is the information that can be gleaned when consumers interact with 360 VR ads. At Advrtas, we’re able to track dozens of behavioral data points (something traditional ads can’t) that allow brands to accurately measure ad engagement and effectiveness. We’ve introduced a new metric called “Interacted View Time” (IVT) which measures how long people engage with a 360 VR ad that can be compared to the passive engagement of traditional videos. We also track key measurables like how people engage, what they engage with, where they look, what interests them the most and so much more. Combined, this allows brands to optimize their advertising strategy and their creative in real time which further improves ad performance and delivers market research data that can’t be derived from traditional display or video ads.

360 VR Ads Deliver Opportunities

So as the immersive advertising space continues to evolve, it’s imperative that advertisers look beyond misleading, negative headlines and dig deeper. Immersive ads like 360 VR ads (including 360 video ads) deliver opportunities for brands to reach billions of consumers today on the devices they use the most (the smartphone). It’s a chance to better connect with consumers and to envelope them in your brand. It’s a chance to explore a new technology and see what works and what doesn’t so that we can put our best foot forward and deliver ads that achieve success for advertisers. It’s an opportunity for brands to change the ad game and deliver ads that consumers want to engage with and ultimately drive the bottom line.

What are your thoughts? We’d love to hear your perspective.

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