For some years now, virtual reality has been one of those technologies that has always found its way onto the lists of very promising things that the future will bring us. It is expected that it will allow the creation of new services and experiences, which will open up new business opportunities. Also, it is assumed that it will do some of the things that we now have much better and more immersive.
For marketers, it will be an opportunity to improve customer service, open up new experiences and, not least, find a new arena for ads. But what will the virtual reality ads look like? How will they be used so that they are not intrusive and so that they do not harm something that is still to be consolidated (and that forces the consumer to invest to buy equipment that allows ‘see’ it)?
For now, of course, all are ideas and proposals, although some of the concrete plans that pioneering virtual reality players have already presented allow us to understand in which direction they are going. Facebook has been working on this technology for years and positioning its Oculus. Facebook is also a company that depends – and a lot – on ads.
The weight they have on their accounts is brutal (advertising accounts for 97% of all their income) and Facebook always needs to find new spaces in which to serve advertising. Facebook began testing how advertising worked in its Oculus mobile app.
Now, he has just announced that he will start doing it with his virtual reality glasses. One of the Resolution Games games will be the first to be tested, although they have already explained that other developers will join the test in the coming weeks.
It’s crucial: to serve those ads, they need content. The developers, and as they remember in The Wall Street Journal , must be a very important part of this bet. Facebook has assured the business newspaper that they will take a portion of the advertising revenue generated by the ads.
Where does this advertising come from?
What are those ads like? Facebook insists on one of those things that internet players always remember when they sell the potential of advertising. “Ads are most effective when they are high-quality and relevant,” they explain on their blog.
For this reason, they ensure that they will follow the principles of quality that also mark what can or cannot be advertised on their social network (although here and at this point a whole debate could be opened about whether or not they are quality ads) and consumers will continue to have access to tools to control which advertising serves you.
The ads use the usual data generated by the profile, as is the case with traditional Facebook ads, but they will not use information extracted from the use of Oculus and that is considered sensitive (such as the images that your camera captures or the weight information of your fitness system).
The appearance of the ad
The ad is displayed visually within the image. It’s almost like looking at one more banner (the American tech press describes it as the standard ad boxes on game interfaces). The user, as explained in The Verge , can open it or save that link for later. If you decide to open it, what loads is a special landing within the Oculus browser.
That is, the ad is not, for now, anything particularly groundbreaking in terms of what it allows to do, but at least it maintains the entire process within the service. The scope is still modest. As they have explained to the technology medium from Facebook, the company has not yet decided if the ads could appear in experiences like Oculus Home or in other apps.
