Virtual reality has become mainstream, affordable, and provides experiences consumers want, in a world that marketers have yet to tap into. Brands that understand how to generate an emotional experience through VR will be better prepared for the future. Ben Smith, director of social and emerging media at Callahan, recently attended Oculus Connect, a Facebook event for developers in the virtual reality world. He brought back insights essential to a brand regarding the future of marketing within VR.
Ben states, “Whether it’s augmented reality or virtual reality, experience is something that any brand would desire to have with the customer. It goes beyond just a purchase. It goes beyond just that shallow relationship.”
In this podcast, we discuss what brands should really be prepared for and how VR represents a gateway into consumer experience.
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Welcome to Callahan’s Uncovering Aha! podcast. We talk about a range of topics for marketing decision-makers, with a special focus on how to uncover insights in data to drive brand strategy and inspire creativity. Featuring Ben Smith and Jan-Eric Anderson.
Jan-Eric:
Hi, I’m Jan-Eric Anderson, chief strategy officer at Callahan.
Ben:
And I’m Ben Smith, director of social and emerging media at Callahan.
Jan-Eric:
Ben, thanks for coming back on the podcast today. So we want to get you in here because you recently attended Oculus Connect, a big event in the virtual reality world. And I wanted to pick your brain on what you heard, so it was a few weeks ago, but I’m sure it’s still top of mind. So what were some of the big themes you heard at the event?
Ben:
Yeah, so Oculus Connect, for anybody that doesn’t know, Oculus is Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality division and Oculus Connect is a developer event they host each year to really spotlight where the state of the industry is, where VR is and what they’re investing in as a company. So what’s happening now and what their future vision is.
Jan-Eric:
And how long ago did Facebook buy Oculus?
Ben:
This was Oculus Connect 6, so it’s six years that Facebook has already owned Oculus, just a little before six years. So it’s still relatively new technology, but what’s interesting is when you look at an event like Oculus Connect, and I’ve been to all six of them so far, as you can see this progress year after year where six years ago VR was something completely unattainable to the average person and today is very attainable. And that is kind of the theme this year, Oculus is really looking at how accessible VR has become to the everyday user that mainstream adoption, but also looking at where it’s headed to in the future. So huge investments that are being made in a space deal by Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg still describing it as the next computing platform.
Jan-Eric:
That’s interesting. So I know you’ve been a long advocate for, well, all emerging technology, you’re into it and we’re very fortunate because here at the office you’ll bring gadgets in and it’s things that are not mainstream yet and maybe just brand new to the market. I guess my depth perception over time around what Oculus is or kind of what the user experience has been, it’s been kind of clunky. I mean you’ve had to bring in very specific laptops that are super high powered, super high processing powered and you’re clicking on the laptop while somebody is standing to a headset that has multiple wires running out, maybe something in their hands with other wires coming out. And we kind of have to clear space in the room and then everybody kind of stands around and watches them have whatever this experience is that they’re having. My sense is that the state of the technology is quite different today than that picture that I’ve just described. What’s the reality today of the Oculus experience in terms of hardware and kind of how it works?
Ben:
Yeah, so that’s a great question. This is where people get very impatient. They’re willing to kill off a technology because it’s not consumer mainstream one or two years after it’s released. And when you look at how things were 10, 20 years ago, how long it took to move something to mainstream adoption versus today people have become very impatient, very intolerant. It’s all about how quickly they can start making a profit. Where a company like Facebook is in it for the long haul. They’re willing to lose a lot of money in order to invest in the future where they believe they can make a lot of money.
Jan-Eric:
They’ve got a pretty good investment track record.
Ben:
They have. And something that excites me with VR is I look back over six years and year one we just got the first developer kit. So it was a big clunky headset, like you said, it was attached to a high powered PC. Lot of cables, lot of wires, hand controllers, centers around the room. It was very impractical, so for most people it was a very expensive proposition. I mean a good VR set up with Oculus could be $4,000. It took time to put it together. It took up space. It wasn’t a good place to be.
Jan-Eric:
Right.
Ben:
When I look at where we are today, six years later, we still have the Oculus Rift, the real high powered VR headset, but then we have things like the Oculus Go and the Oculus Quest and the Quest is the one that’s most exciting to me as it’s truly the first self-contained 6DoF headset. What that means is 6DoF is the ability not just to look side to side like you can on some of these phone-based headsets, but to move backwards and forwards, it has depth of field with it.
Ben:
So with the Oculus Quest, with no PC, no phone, no cables, you can put on the headset, it turns itself on and you can instantly be in full immersive, high-end VR with nothing more than a headset itself and just the hand controllers.
Jan-Eric:
And that seems, I mean, that’s come quite a ways. It seems like that becomes much more of a streamlined experience. It makes it much more accessible or practical for many more people to use. And I’m sure that contributes to why they, at the event, would be referring to this as the future computing platform. I mean, it’s seems like it’s set up to become more mainstream. Is it affordable?
Ben:
Yeah. So the great thing is it’s not just really accessible but the price point, it’s like a $400 price point. So down from $4,000 to $400 in a space for a few years. But then the other thing is how it keeps evolving. So one of the things, Connect this year, it was looking at how do we make it even more accessible and what they announced was the removal of hand controllers. So basically the ability for the headset and cameras to sense your hand movement and to bring your hands inside VR without having to have controllers. So suddenly you’ve just lost another piece of technology. Now all you have is a headset, nothing more. The headset is small enough it can be folded up and put in a backpack, carry it around with you. It has no wires, no phone, no PC and now, not even hand controllers.
Jan-Eric:
My headset at home is one step behind that. I’ve got a Go, a Oculus Go, and the kids and I love it. They use it more than I do. But for anybody who has not had an experience putting on one of these headsets, it’s hard to describe until you’ve done it. So if you’re listening to this podcast and you haven’t experienced a VR, you should because there’s kind of no substitute for actually experiencing itself, experiencing it. Which I think kind of brings me into the the next kind of whole thing I want to talk to you about, which is the content and maybe that’s not even the right word for it. The types of experiences that are available today to people who engage with VR. What do you do with VR? What are the types of experiences you’re going to be able to have? My feeling of it is, a lot of it is AR games, interactive type games or experiences. Maybe travel tourism type things where you can transport to different places because you can kind of go anywhere you want, right, within this headset from your own living room.
Ben:
Yep.
Jan-Eric:
What are the types of experiences today that are available to someone using this technology?
Ben:
Yeah, so right now that’s the interest is the second part of a technology is you have the hardware, you have the consumer adoption and what really drives consumer adoption is the ecosystem around it, which is the software. So by its nature right now gaming is still very much at the forefront. You know, you think about that appeals to a very broad demographic from the younger kids through to adults. The type of experiences you can game in range, everything from kind of the traditional shooter type games and kind of action games through to e-gaming which is a highly competitive industry, very well funded industry, an industry where people are actually getting full ride scholarships to learn, to compete in e-gaming. And a lot of that is based inside VR headsets.
Ben:
So while we say gaming, gaming actually has a lot of depth to it. Beyond that, there’s a lot of media consumption. So, you think if you put the headset on and it’s a comfortable headset and you can lay back and watch a movie, Netflix, whatever inside the headset, you’ve lost the biggest challenge. You’ve lost the screen, you now have a screen that you’re defining how big it is. You’re watching it without limits in a much larger, more comfortable environment. So it’s great for media consumption and for 360 media, but also the era it’s really evolving is social VR, the ability to be in one space with multiple people, whether it’s one other person or many other people, whether you’re at a sporting event, at a concert in, an office, just hanging out with people. The ability to share a space with somebody else.
Jan-Eric:
It’s fascinating. So, it kind of removes the limit of proximity. I don’t have to be in, live in the same town as my best friend to be able to get together with my best friend to watch a movie or to watch a game, our favorite team or whatever that would be happening. So you’re not limited by that.
Ben:
Correct. The phrase I love is presence without proximity. VR has a misconception of being a very isolating experience. And it can be, you can put on the headset, you can transport to somewhere else, be on your own, but VR is an incredible social experience. That ability to feel like you’re with somebody or you’re at a place without actually being there.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah. So the word that keeps coming up is experience.
Ben:
Yep.
Jan-Eric:
And so what I think is really interesting is that we may be, as VR becomes more mainstream, we may be kind of coming to this crossroads in the marketing world of what brands are supposed to do with this and how are brands evolving to be relevant to the world and relevant in this world that we live in and culture and evolving with technology. We talk a lot about brand positioning. We talk a lot about brand tone and brand identity. We also then in separate conversations we’ll talk about consumers and younger, more influential consumers. Gen Z, millennials seeking experience, not material things. It begs the question whether or not a majority of brands are really prepared for what’s coming and how VR represents a gateway into experience, not messaging. It’s something that consumers want. And I say consumers, I shouldn’t use that word. Humans want experience. The brands that understand what experience they can deliver are probably better prepared for the future that’s coming through devices like VR. Does that make sense?
Ben:
It does. There’s a lot of debate whether VR will truly mainstream and to me that feels a little misguided. That’s a focus on technology versus what technology empowers. So whether it’s AR, augmented reality, or virtual reality, experience is something that any brand would desire to have with the customer. So it goes beyond just a purchase. It goes beyond just that shallow relationship.
Jan-Eric:
The functional benefit of the product of whatever it does. Yeah, totally. Because the emotion will … Our experience can stir emotion and stir feeling, which becomes a pathway to how a human would define loyalty or understanding or familiarity, which is, I mean this is the Holy grail for brands, right? And what they’re trying to establish, what marketers are trying to get to. So man, it begs the question, for brands, what is our experience and how do we create experience? How do we think about experience and deliver that through VR? Your comment is fascinating. It’s eyeopening. As I’m thinking about this, even in the conversation that we’ve been having so far, so much of it’s been focused on the technology, but when the human being puts that thing on, it’s not about the technology.
Jan-Eric:
It’s overwhelming the immersive experience you’re getting and you forget that you’re wearing a piece of high powered tech, you are completely lost in a completely new world. That’s a pretty provocative idea I think.
Ben:
Yeah, but one of my favorite videos of the VR experience has been seeing veterans, like World War II veterans, who put on the headset and you see the look on their faces, they’re transported back to experiences they went through during the war itself. You can see their whole demeanor, their face change, and it’s something incredibly moving.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah.
Ben:
It’s not about the technology. That’s about the experience and the emotion that technology facilitates.
Jan-Eric:
It’s a virtual world that they’re in there, but it is a very real world reaction.
Ben:
Absolutely.
Jan-Eric:
There’s no question about it. Yeah, that’s amazing. Well, it’s a pretty provocative idea. And I think something that marketers who are savvy and thinking, really thinking, about what’s coming and maybe it’s kind of what’s starting to walk through the door. It’s not that it’s down the road, it’s kind of here. Need to be thinking about experience and that’s a whole new deal. That’s not just about how a brand is experienced through its use, but what kind of emotional experience that a brand is trying to generate. That’s a pretty provocative thing. We talked a little bit about this limited proximity, not being limited by proximity. Is this kind of the future then of social? If this continues to become more and more mainstream, then is VR kind of the future form of social?
Ben:
Yeah, so obviously there’s a reason that Facebook invested in VR and I think if you asked them, is it the future of social, the answer will be overwhelmingly yes. So you think of social as it evolved. We started off by sharing text updates, posting on Facebook in texts. Then we added photos, then we add videos, then we add live video. So where does it go from there? What if showing somebody, you’re sharing with somebody, what if you’re sharing in real time with somebody? Instead of posting a photo on the beach, what if the person can be on the beach next to you in real time? So there’s a lot of opportunity there to share experiences with people but also to interact with people. So back to that phrase of presence without proximity. Social of course is about being social. So what if you can actually feel like you’re with somebody, even if they’re a thousand miles away? What if you can truly feel like they’re in the same room with you interacting with you and you forget the technology and you forget everything else. It just feels real.
Jan-Eric:
And bringing people more and more together. So another big theme that we hear … Well, we talk a lot about in general about making stronger connections, certainly through experience, but another one is to personalize the experience. I think I know the answer, but I’ll ask anyway. The idea of personalizing experiences through Oculus is absolutely a huge opportunity. I mean, we can personalize things to the individual user based on their interests or their age or their demographic or whatever. There are ways to personalize these experiences as well. Is that fair?
Ben:
Yeah. There’s two really cool opportunities there. The first ties back to the last thing we talked about of social, so something that Facebook launched or announced at Oculus Connect was Facebook Horizons, which is a new virtual world. Think of a combination between Minecraft, SimCity, if you’ve ever read the book or seen it in the movie, Ready Player One. This is kind of Facebook’s version of the Oasis of how people can share, create, and build very real experiences inside a virtual world. Well, it can be totally customed to them and shared with who they want or shared with everybody. The second part is how we do that offline. So then I go to think about things like experiential marketing. People invest a lot of money in creating a onetime experience that can’t be scaled out. It brings a few people to the experience. What if instead of building one, you can build it in a digital space and scale it out to everybody.
Jan-Eric:
Right.
Ben:
But then even different ways. There’s a company called Sandbox VR who have invested a lot of money in building mobile based experiences basically where you pay and you’d go in and you find yourself in a different space with your friends. And they actually just this week completed another major fundraising with celebrity investors like Justin Timberlake, Will Smith, and others really thinking about how can you customize one blank space to be many different things to-
Jan-Eric:
Different people.
Ben:
… many different people?
Jan-Eric:
Yeah.
Ben:
But it’s still one space.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah, and there’s a lot of possibility there. So I guess one other topic that I wanted to bring up, was a story, I think it was on NPR. This is a while back, but it was talking about maybe an unexpected use of VR. And this is a little bit similar to what you were just saying, which is what made me think of it. Being able to bring a consistent experience to the masses and the example that was being talked about was actually not through marketing at all. And it was an example of a company that was using VR for training purposes for their employees. This was not outward facing.
Jan-Eric:
It was a mechanism and an example of how to use emerging technology to build efficiency and consistency for training purposes. I think it may have been their HR department or it was something in corporate communications dealing with how to greet guests or deal with crisis within the store or something along those lines. You probably know exactly what I’m talking about, but I was fascinated by this and it never even occurred to me that would be a great way to use the technology. So I’m sure you’re familiar with this, but non-marketing application for this technology, for companies it goes well beyond marketing.
Ben:
Yeah. So already we have like the armed forces and first responders use VR extensively for training because you can put people in very real scenarios with very little expense and no danger, but on a corporate side you’ve got a lot of applications. You’ve got companies like Walmart and Hilton Hotels who use it for training around guest experience. What they’ve found is that the guest satisfaction can increase significantly as they’re dealt with the training and the training itself can be very empathy based. You’re not just reading a book or going through a class, you’re actually in a situation, in many different situations, where you can feel genuine empathy towards the people you’re interacting with. Companies like Purina use it for replicating factory environments where it could be a hazardous situation so you can feel very immersed in it, go through the routine, but never be in any hazard itself. And when you go out on the factory floor it’s already very familiar to you.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah, you’re familiar and you kind of know what to do and you’ve had the opportunity to experience a very real example of this kind of in a test simulation without risk of anybody getting hurt or anything real happening. It’s fascinating.
Ben:
Yeah. For a company like Walmart, what if you can, and this is what they do, send a VR headset out to each store instead of sending a trainer traveling out to each store.
Jan-Eric:
Thousands of locations. The efficiency in that is fascinating.
Ben:
Oh, it’s incredible.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah. All right. Well Ben, thanks for joining us.
Ben:
A pleasure. Thank you.
You’ve been listening to the Uncovering Aha Podcast. Callahan provides data savvy strategy and inspired creativity for national consumer brands. Visit us at callahan.agency to learn more.