There’s growing excitement about the metaverse. In fact, we saw conversations on Facebook around the term “metaverse” increase globally by nearly 700% between July 2020 and September 2021. And while this new era of technology isn’t fully realized just yet, augmented reality (AR) is a readily available first step that bridges the gap.
By now, anyone with a mobile phone has probably encountered AR. More than 700 million people use AR across Meta technologies every month as of October 2021. This includes my 75-year-old mother-in-law, who loves using AR effects on her phone to show me how my home could look better with upgraded furniture.
As always, it’s consumers that are leading the way by showing through their actions what’s resonating with them—often adopting technology faster than businesses. So, it’s critical for marketers to adapt or risk getting left behind. The good news is that many forward-looking brands are already leaning into AR to give customers the immersive experiences they want today. Have you taken your first step?
How to start your metaverse journey with AR
Every journey worth taking centers on exploration, including the road to the metaverse. Augmented reality is a first step and will remain a foundational technology. But businesses will need to test, learn and adapt (repeatedly) to figure out how to best engage with their customers through AR.
Today, we typically experience AR through a phone or tablet. It creates more immersive experiences by overlaying visual information on real-world surroundings, such as filter effects or virtual try-ons. However, that’s just scratching the surface; in the future, we envision these experiences coming to full-blown AR glasses.
Key considerations for businesses
When diving into augmented reality, there’s no better time than now to begin this iterative process, collect insights to share across your organization and start refining your work. Keep in mind these three key considerations:
Focus on customer value. Augmented reality experiences can be purely functional, purely entertaining—or a little of both. But they must be meaningful to keep people coming back. Analyze your customers and their journey, then form a hypothesis about how and where you can uniquely add value (and potentially joy) to their experiences with your brand.
For instance, Walmart collaborated with Meta Business Partner and AR producer Vertebrae to develop AR camera effects that gave people the ability to interact with products in 3D, mimicking the functionality of an in-person experience. This resulted in a 10X increase in time spent compared to business-as-usual ads.
Silk, on the other hand, ran interactive AR ads featuring celebrity influencers and a just-for-fun filter effect that helped boost awareness of their new oat milk.
Evaluate your existing partnerships. Can the creatives, agencies and creators in your ecosystem bring your AR vision to life? Work together to determine whether your team could benefit from bringing in specialists like AR technical creators. These are developers and 3D designers with advanced skills specifically in producing AR experiences for brands—such as those in our Meta Spark Partner Network. Many are actually making AR their full-time careers, either with an independent client base, working at an agency or with a vetted Meta Business Partner.
For example, Sephora France partnered with Jessica Harrington, an AR technical creator and neuroscientist, as well as Roman Bratschi, a more traditional influencer known for making beautiful motion graphics. Together, they created AR effects that would help consumers “smell with their eyes” for the launch of a new perfume collection during a time when many retail locations were closed. The results? Sephora saw a 17-point lift in ad recall with creator assets plus business-as-usual assets.
Encourage learning across your teams. Given how quickly the landscape is changing, we’re all learning together. It’s important for businesses to see how others are preparing for this exciting future with AR ads. Meta also recently rolled out a webinar series, “Building for the Metaverse” that dives deeper into many of the topics in this article. And to learn more about creating and publishing AR effects for your brand, check out our new Meta Spark Blueprint courses for creatives and developers. The Quick Start course can get your teams up to speed in just 90 minutes. And if they’d like to get more hands-on, Spark AR Studio is a free self-service desktop app that enables creators from the Spark AR Partner or Meta Business Partner networks to create, test and publish augmented reality effects for businesses across Facebook, Instagram and soon Messenger.
What’s next?
As the metaverse continues to take shape, people’s experiences and personal connections will become increasingly immersive and digital. Augmented reality on mobile is a first step toward building for this future, and businesses will need to continually evolve. Thankfully, it will be a collaborative effort with help from creators, agencies, developers and other companies. Creators, for instance, will be key partners to scale these new experiences to engaged audiences. So, remember, you’re not on this road alone.
To learn more about how to take your marketing into new dimensions with augmented reality, visit Meta for Business.
