Augmented Reality has become a Reality in Marketing

What was once a far-off idea that existed only in the fantastic worlds of sci-fi classics such as Star Trek, Star Wars and the like, is now a reality and used to push marketing promotions among the young and tech-savvy generation!

http://mashable.com/2011/01/15/goldrun/

Augmented reality has now leapt off the pages of our imagination and is being integrated into innovative promotional ideas that blur the line the between reality and virtual reality. GoldRun is a new app using augmented reality to enhance and add another level of interactivity to existing location-based apps such as Foursquare and scvngr. In the article’s case study, H&M utilized GoldRun to initiate a virtual scavenger hunt. Participants were encouraged to collect virtual H&M products by snapping a picture of the item outside any of its 10 Manhattan locations.

Such applications and platforms really emphasizes the mobility of today’s technology and how we are increasingly dependent or ‘encouraged’ to interact with the real world through the lens of our gadgets. Other social media based marketing platforms such as PromoJam or Wildfire (which focus on Twitter and Facebook based promotions), operate in a similar manner, getting consumers to participate and interact with the brand and with one another through a digital device.

With the rise of technology and the ubiquity of social media tools, marketing is no longer about utilizing ‘old’ media outlets such as advertising to influence its consumers. It has become far more interactive and experiential. Consumers no longer wish to be treated as passive recipients but expect to be involved in some shape or form with the brand’s evolution. As we become more dependent on smart phone technologies, how then will applications and tools evolve to get us even more entrenched into the virtual worlds they present? What then happens to the ‘real world’?