iStockOn August 15th this year, a much-loved kids’ brand, Cadbury Gems, held an online birthday party for kids and their families and ended up entering the Guinness Book of World Records for hosting the largest virtual event. On the same day, there was a live streaming of the launch of Ola Electric Scooters on multiple platforms and it got an audience running into hundreds of thousands.
Different audiences. Different categories. But what was common was the unbridled enthusiasm of audiences to engage in these online experiences.
Immersive online experiences which mimic real world experiences have been the defining theme for brands in the digital world in the last two years. I will detail out four areas which saw great digital innovations.
Product Launches
It seems so long ago that a product launch meant a PR event in the ballroom of a 5-Star hotel, reportage in the press next day, coinciding with a full-page ad of the launch and the flagging off of a marketing campaign.
As product launches move online, there is much more active involvement of the consumers in the launch. Ola Electric kept the buzz around their new scooter going for close to a month leading to the launch, and created a fairly large community of people who were looking forward to the event itself. And as the event unfurled, consumers started getting a peek into the details of the product, how they are manufactured and most importantly how they are priced, all in real time and directly from Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola’s Founder-CEO.
Apart from live demos of new products and real time interaction with the audience, digital also helped bring products to life for consumers. When Xiaomi launched their laptop range last year, we created an experience where, with Augmented Reality one could experience the product as if it was in one’s living room or study.
Around the world, we have seen product launches which have used a variety of cool online tactics. Consumers had to convince a WhatsApp chatbot named Sven to get into Absolut Vodka’s launch party. Virtual product unboxing and presence of influencers or their digital avatars/ holograms across locations keep the spirit of physical launch events as they go virtual.
Brand Spaces and Stores
Brands are recreating physical stores, experiences and brand stories into digital formats. One of the earliest categories to do this was automobiles. An online car showroom, replete with car configurators to personalise a customer’s choice and make that choice come to life has been put into use by most car majors.
Closer home, when you log into Lenskart, you will experience what you would normally do when you walk into an eyewear store near you. Where you put on different spectacle frames and check it out in the mirror. On Lenskart, this entire experience gets replicated with a combination of face recognition and AR technology. The website scans your face and when you start looking at various spectacle frames, what you see is how those frames look on you.
This extends beyond products. We have worked on an amazing project for Netflix along with the Brooklyn Museum where you can enter the museum in its online avatar and see the actual dresses worn by the cast of ‘The Crown’ and ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ and explore those in detail.
The biggest play happening here though has to do with what is called ‘tactile e-commerce’. One of the challenges with online purchases has been the lack of ‘touch and feel’ in any e-purchase. Now, studies have found that simply imagining touching an object produces the same feeling of ownership around it, as actually touching it. Imagine being able to swivel around a pair of shoes on your mobile device the way you would do it when you walk into a Bata showroom. That experience has started making its way on to e-platforms and will soon become the norm.
Live Events
Given the limited number of live events people could attend due to the pandemic, a big part of marketers’ challenge has been about recreating these experiences in the online space.
One of the best examples here is a virtual concert that the online game Fortnite conducted. The concert featured a massive avatar of Travis Scott, performing on a digital island, taking different forms - from a cyborg to a spaceman - against dazzling backdrops in a 15-minute set. The experience garnered 12.3 million views on the first day. They followed it up with a virtual concert by Ariana Grande. This is perhaps just a sneak peek into what will be possible within the much spoken about ‘metaverse’.
If that is what was happening with music, sports was not far behind. We have worked with the NBA to beam the finals of NBA live on VR. With just an Oculus, it felt like you were watching the game live in the stadium, while in reality you were just on your laptop or a mobile device. The technology is here. And I would bet that once we figure out the hardware (VR headset) availability in numbers, we could be watching IPL live on VR very shortly.
In the case alluded to earlier, Mondelez presented a virtual birthday party for the relaunch of Cadbury Gems, complete with invites, a countdown checker, games, magic shows, videos and cake cutting. Everything that happened as it would in real life. But the real joy was in the fact that children, who had been closeted indoors, could for an hour or so, experience a birthday party as they would in real life.
Brand activations
There are lots of brand activations that have used digital in an engaging way to capture consumer imagination.
A few stealth activations have seen remarkably creative use of the digital medium to make their point. An example of this is the work by ‘Reporters without Borders’. The Uncensored Library is a project where Minecraft was used to circumvent cyber censorship. Since Minecraft is freely available around the globe, a virtual library was opened of locally censored articles inside it on World Day Against Cyber Censorship. People could access the library freely and roam the 12.5 million-block structure to find articles that are otherwise inaccessible in their country.
Another piece of work that caught my eye recently is ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ by Dentsu Webchutney. The work, through Insta filters, narrates the stories of disputed artefacts that are on display at the British Museum.
Closer home, inspired by the sudden interest in crypto currencies, one of the most engaging ideas to come out was from Mondelez. Five Star introduced ‘Nothing Coin’ a meme coin that furthered their brand promise of ‘do nothing’. Consumers can mine ‘Nothing Coins’ by doing… you guessed it, nothing.
And there is more
This is just the beginning. As digital starts taking hold, innovative ideas start mushrooming and tech deployment gets stronger, we are bound to see more ideas, better ideas and much more innovative uses of the digital medium. In fashion, we are seeing virtual fashion shows. In education, interactive classes and AI based learning methodologies are already available across platforms. We have already seen gamification of OTT content and there is promise of more.
(The writer is COO, Media.Monks India, a digital-first marketing and advertising services company that connects content, data & digital media and technology services across one global team built from the bottom up)
Different audiences. Different categories. But what was common was the unbridled enthusiasm of audiences to engage in these online experiences.
Immersive online experiences which mimic real world experiences have been the defining theme for brands in the digital world in the last two years. I will detail out four areas which saw great digital innovations.
Product Launches
It seems so long ago that a product launch meant a PR event in the ballroom of a 5-Star hotel, reportage in the press next day, coinciding with a full-page ad of the launch and the flagging off of a marketing campaign.
As product launches move online, there is much more active involvement of the consumers in the launch. Ola Electric kept the buzz around their new scooter going for close to a month leading to the launch, and created a fairly large community of people who were looking forward to the event itself. And as the event unfurled, consumers started getting a peek into the details of the product, how they are manufactured and most importantly how they are priced, all in real time and directly from Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola’s Founder-CEO.
Apart from live demos of new products and real time interaction with the audience, digital also helped bring products to life for consumers. When Xiaomi launched their laptop range last year, we created an experience where, with Augmented Reality one could experience the product as if it was in one’s living room or study.
Around the world, we have seen product launches which have used a variety of cool online tactics. Consumers had to convince a WhatsApp chatbot named Sven to get into Absolut Vodka’s launch party. Virtual product unboxing and presence of influencers or their digital avatars/ holograms across locations keep the spirit of physical launch events as they go virtual.
Brand Spaces and Stores
Brands are recreating physical stores, experiences and brand stories into digital formats. One of the earliest categories to do this was automobiles. An online car showroom, replete with car configurators to personalise a customer’s choice and make that choice come to life has been put into use by most car majors.
Closer home, when you log into Lenskart, you will experience what you would normally do when you walk into an eyewear store near you. Where you put on different spectacle frames and check it out in the mirror. On Lenskart, this entire experience gets replicated with a combination of face recognition and AR technology. The website scans your face and when you start looking at various spectacle frames, what you see is how those frames look on you.
This extends beyond products. We have worked on an amazing project for Netflix along with the Brooklyn Museum where you can enter the museum in its online avatar and see the actual dresses worn by the cast of ‘The Crown’ and ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ and explore those in detail.
The biggest play happening here though has to do with what is called ‘tactile e-commerce’. One of the challenges with online purchases has been the lack of ‘touch and feel’ in any e-purchase. Now, studies have found that simply imagining touching an object produces the same feeling of ownership around it, as actually touching it. Imagine being able to swivel around a pair of shoes on your mobile device the way you would do it when you walk into a Bata showroom. That experience has started making its way on to e-platforms and will soon become the norm.
Live Events
Given the limited number of live events people could attend due to the pandemic, a big part of marketers’ challenge has been about recreating these experiences in the online space.
One of the best examples here is a virtual concert that the online game Fortnite conducted. The concert featured a massive avatar of Travis Scott, performing on a digital island, taking different forms - from a cyborg to a spaceman - against dazzling backdrops in a 15-minute set. The experience garnered 12.3 million views on the first day. They followed it up with a virtual concert by Ariana Grande. This is perhaps just a sneak peek into what will be possible within the much spoken about ‘metaverse’.
If that is what was happening with music, sports was not far behind. We have worked with the NBA to beam the finals of NBA live on VR. With just an Oculus, it felt like you were watching the game live in the stadium, while in reality you were just on your laptop or a mobile device. The technology is here. And I would bet that once we figure out the hardware (VR headset) availability in numbers, we could be watching IPL live on VR very shortly.
In the case alluded to earlier, Mondelez presented a virtual birthday party for the relaunch of Cadbury Gems, complete with invites, a countdown checker, games, magic shows, videos and cake cutting. Everything that happened as it would in real life. But the real joy was in the fact that children, who had been closeted indoors, could for an hour or so, experience a birthday party as they would in real life.
Brand activations
There are lots of brand activations that have used digital in an engaging way to capture consumer imagination.
A few stealth activations have seen remarkably creative use of the digital medium to make their point. An example of this is the work by ‘Reporters without Borders’. The Uncensored Library is a project where Minecraft was used to circumvent cyber censorship. Since Minecraft is freely available around the globe, a virtual library was opened of locally censored articles inside it on World Day Against Cyber Censorship. People could access the library freely and roam the 12.5 million-block structure to find articles that are otherwise inaccessible in their country.
Another piece of work that caught my eye recently is ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ by Dentsu Webchutney. The work, through Insta filters, narrates the stories of disputed artefacts that are on display at the British Museum.
Closer home, inspired by the sudden interest in crypto currencies, one of the most engaging ideas to come out was from Mondelez. Five Star introduced ‘Nothing Coin’ a meme coin that furthered their brand promise of ‘do nothing’. Consumers can mine ‘Nothing Coins’ by doing… you guessed it, nothing.
And there is more
This is just the beginning. As digital starts taking hold, innovative ideas start mushrooming and tech deployment gets stronger, we are bound to see more ideas, better ideas and much more innovative uses of the digital medium. In fashion, we are seeing virtual fashion shows. In education, interactive classes and AI based learning methodologies are already available across platforms. We have already seen gamification of OTT content and there is promise of more.
(The writer is COO, Media.Monks India, a digital-first marketing and advertising services company that connects content, data & digital media and technology services across one global team built from the bottom up)
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
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