The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity celebrates the best advertising of the past year. But at this summer’s annual ode to ads, the big winner in the mobile category wasn’t an ad at all. It was a piece of cardboard.
Imaginatively named Cardboard by Google, its designer, it folds out into a small corrugated box with two plastic lenses that sells for as little as the price of a Starbucks venti latte. Pop in a smartphone and you’ve got a crude but surprisingly effective version of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality goggles due out early next year for an expected $350.
To the adland elite at Cannes, this signaled a momentous development: the dawn of the next great mass medium to sell us products and services. Now the nearly 2 billion consumers worldwide who own smartphones can potentially venture into immersive, ultra-realistic virtual reality games, short films, live streams and, already, ads. Brands ranging from North Face to Gatorade started creating VR experiences of their own, hoping to reach people in an even more magnetic medium than television.
And it may well be the lowly Cardboard that brings that medium to the masses. Earlier this year, Google estimated that about 1 million Cardboards had been distributed, and that was before the New York Times recently distributed more than a million to its subscribers. And some 15 million Cardboard apps have been downloaded, says Aaron Luber, head of partnerships and business development for Cardboard. The trifling cost of Cardboard, as well as its ease of use compared with bulky headsets such as the Rift and Samsung’s Gear, has some observers predicting it could appeal to more people more quickly than its better-known and more feature-rich rivals.
A bit of background on VR for the uninitiated: These devices allow viewers to navigate 3-D videos and animations that are shot or created to provide 360-degree views, up, down and all around, as well as directional sounds that shift with head movements. Your brain thinks it’s all real.
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How real? I recently strapped on an Oculus at the Palo Alto (Calif.) offices of VR production house Jaunt and watched a video it helped create for the outdoors retailer North Face. One scene had a mountain climber leaping off a sheer cliff in rocky Moab, Utah, before opening his parachute. Two seconds into seeing open air beneath my feet, my latent acrophobia flared and I forgot about how dorky I must look in this contraption. Suffice to say, the experience captured my full attention.
“This is the ‘holy crap’ moment that brand people get the first time they try VR,” says former Lucasfilm executive David Anderman, Jaunt’s chief business officer. Advertisers know how hard it has become to get people’s sustained attention as they flit across an ever more crowded media landscape. They hope the immersive nature and even intimacy of virtual reality will help them connect more deeply with consumers.
But with what kind of ads? Marketers are struggling to figure that out. It’s tough, because it’s not yet apparent what kind of programming besides games will catch on to provide a place for advertising. And if the VR equivalent of cinema’s “The Great Train Robbery” or television’s sitcom, let alone the Super Bowl, does not exist yet, how are advertisers supposed to come up with anything like that iconic and extremely lucrative 30-second spot? Both creators of content and creators of ads need to figure this out pretty quickly, or a promising new medium could be fade faster than you can say 3-D TV or Second Life, the virtual world that was hot in the aughts.
For now, marketers are producing mostly eye candy in their own apps and on YouTube’s 360 VR site. Borrowed buzz won’t cut it for long, though. TV and movie studios, newspaper and magazine companies, and websites are already starting to produce VR content of various kinds.
In January, Samsung, maker of the Gear VR headset, announced a VR video service and a partnership with David Alpert, executive producer of “The Walking Dead,” who plans to create a fictional series for the service. Newspaper publisher Gannett as well as the Times have also started creating longer-form content with advertising models roughly similar to those on TV and online.
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