After reading the interview with the Best Buy guy whom was responsible for launching AR a few weeks ago, I was curious to see what round #2 would bring in the way of incremental changes / improvements. Well, the answer to that is not much.
Sure, a different product is being features (a Sony Eco-HDTV instead of a Toshiba laptop), but nothing else really changed. The microsite (www.BestBuyIn3D.com) could be more connected to BestBuy.com and/or the current Best Buy weekly ad site. In addition, the overall consumer messaging and value proposition could be made stronger. It’s not clear why a consumer would take the time to check out the AR enhanced print ad. Still very excited to see the innovation with augmented reality within print ads, as it offers a very fun way of blurring the lines between the offline and online worlds.
Augmented Reality second appearance within the Best Buy weekly ad. Nothing really different than the initial week's release.
So with both Wal-Mart and Best Buy trying out augmented reality (AR) within their print ads / Sunday circulars recently, no one outside of these two retailers really knew how successful the general consumer adopting was to this new way of interacting with print ads online. Until now when Best Buy went on the record with a recent AdAge.com article (9/5/09) written by Abbey Klassen. The top-line metrics of success that Best Buy cited were:
- About 6,500 people tried out Best Buy’s augmented reality insert — more than double the company’s expectations (out of a total print circular distribution of around 43 million)
- 78% of the people that actually went to the site wanting to see the experience had a webcam.
- A high click-through — 12% — to other pages (from the core AR page): the Twelpforce page, the Next Class computing page or to the dot-com site for the Toshiba computer itself
- Going to do more (next one in Sept is the rumor) so to continue to learn and refine program
Best Buy called their augmented reality (AR) experience "Best Buy in 3D"
Seems like a lot of effort to get 6,500 people to interact. However my guess is that most consumers just didn’t understand what to do, what the value of doing it would be or just all together didn’t pick up on the simple fact that this augmented reality experience was available. The core AR idea has legs, it just needs to be implemented, messaged and promoted in different ways that retailers I am sure will learn with more time and experience using this new technology. Below is a complete re-post of the AdAge.com article…
Best Buy’s Augmented-Reality Ad Dazzles, but Does It Work?
Q&A: Retailer’s Spencer Knisely on the 3-D Toshiba Laptop in This Week’s Sunday Circular
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Best Buy got props on Sunday when its weekly supplement came equipped with a 3-D notebook computer — that is, if you had a webcam and held the circular up to it, you’d see a 3-D image of a Toshiba laptop, thanks to the technology known as augmented reality.
About 6,500 people tried out Best Buy’s augmented reality insert — more than double the company’s expectations.
Augmented reality has garnered more than its share of enthusiasm from early adopters and tech geeks, but its marketing value is yet to be determined. Is it a passing fad or truly useful in creating richer digital-marketing experiences? In Best Buy’s case, the weekly insert was sent to its normal circulation of 43 million and, on Sunday, about 6,500 tried it out — more than double the company’s expectations. Still, it’s a small number and may temper other marketers’ augmented-reality expectations. We talked to Spencer Knisely, director-brand identity, print and design at Best Buy, who shared early results and promised this wouldn’t be the last we’d see of AR at Best Buy.
Ad Age: Explain the reasoning behind this circular.
Spencer Knisely: There’s lots of talk about the impending demise of newspapers and circular readership, and there’s truth and fiction in that issue. But certainly all parties can agree it’s in transformation. Inserts have a role to play in their own migration. We started this journey [of making circulars interactive] with SMS messaging and IVR [or interactive voice response]. … Both of those return to your customer ratings and reviews and a link to something else. We’re trying to think of the circular, instead of being the end of all promotional activity, as the beginning. It’s a great organizing tool for promotional activity, but it doesn’t offer all the different connections that we want.
Ad Age: How did people use it?
Mr. Knisely: It was hard to predict what the adoption would be. We knew a couple of things. We knew we have weekly circ of 46 million, and we had spoken with our business team, computing and computing accessories team and said, ‘What’s the install base of webcams?’ They believed 20% of households have a functioning webcam. So knowing those things, we projected maybe 2,500 people would give it a shot. We were surprised to learn many more connected with and used the experience — 6,500 was the last report, and that was just for one-day activity [on Sunday]. In fact, 78% of the people that actually went to the site wanting to see the experience had a webcam. Either our webcam projections are wrong or we overindex and the people reading our inserts have kept up with technology and have the latest gear and know how to use it.
Ad Age: How clear was it [in the circular] that you need a webcam to do this?
Mr. Knisely: There was a footnote at bottom of the page, and buried in with all the other footnotes — the legal disclaimers and such — there was a note that said you have to have a webcam. Whether that’s prominent is really debatable, but we did technically tell folks they needed one.
Ad Age: Was Toshiba involved?
Mr. Knisely: We discovered the technology by just investigating what kind of cool things we can do out there, and we contacted our partner here in town, Modern Climate, which built the experience for us. We said, “Hey, we heard you’d done one of these in the past. How hard would it be for you to do one for us for the insert in six weeks or so?”
At the time, we weren’t thinking about engaging our vendor partners or as a cooperative investment opportunity but as a new thing to do with our insert that would be kind of fun. We have the opportunity now, having proven that it did work, to go to our manufacturer partners and asking if they have an interest in expanding the kind of messaging you can deliver. Ultimately the front cover is a fixed amount of real estate; you can only say so many things. But if you get yourself to the cover, this can be a portal to lots of other messaging, should you choose to do that.
Ad Age: Can you tell what the real business result — or conversion — of this was?
Mr. Knisely: We don’t know that yet. We saw comparatively high click-through — 12% — to other pages: the Twelpforce page, the Next Class computing page or to the dot-com site for the Toshiba computer itself. But aggregated, a 12% click-through on an experience like that is fairly decent.
I believe we’ll be able to see who actually made a purchase … through cookies placed on the machine. They’ll tell us where you came from, and those are the kinds of things we’re watching now too.
We’re also watching now for the secondary bounce we’re getting. Lots of folks saw it in the insert, typed it into their browser directly, and that was the Sunday experience. But there was also the opportunity to share this through social-media sites, and we’re seeing our second and third bounces as people are referring it to their friends and family. How many echoes do we get — and how long do they last — from one placement in the circular?
Ad Age: Would you do this again?
Mr. Knisely: We have plans to do more AR in the future, active projects on the books. Our point of view is you have to offer a range of ways for the consumer to interact. It’s too early to tell whether any of these things is a replacement of — but they’re certainly an enhancement to — a traditional insert.
Best Buy becomes the second major US retailer to roll out Augmented Reality (or AR for short which is a a form of the emergent Web3D category) this last weekend. This follows Wal-Mart’s deployment of AR a few months ago.
This is the front cover of the Best Buy weekly ad that includes the iconic yellow and black marker image that triggers the AR animations to come to life.
Best Buy is trying to drive cross channel, print – to – web, movement by pushing consumers of the print weekly ad to a custom Adobe Flash based online landing page called Best Buy in 3D. Within this microsite, the consumer simply holds up the printed weekly ad front cover and an engaging product specific sequence begins to roll. One of the immediate questions is if this will be just a one-time event for Best Buy, or if some or all future weekly ads will have at least one AR supported product. Another question is what is the purpose? Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of bringing innovation to print advertising and blurring the lines between physical and virtual worlds. But what is the goal here?
- Drive awareness of the print ad?
- Increase weekly ad readership?
- Brand positioning as fun and hip?
- Create some viral spread around the AR concept?
- Pull in some new customers with this gimmick?
- Help start training print weekly ad users to go online for the weekly ad in the future?
On the front cover of the August 2, 2009 Best Buy weekly ad was a large marker image that if a consumer takes their weekly ad to www.bestbuyin3d.com This screen shots shows what happens once the marker is recognized by the augmented reality web application.
So Wal-Mart is doing a fun trial application of augmented reality (AR) which is the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real video footage in real time. There are numerous advertising applications of this new Web3D technology, this being one of the larger mass-audiences ones I’ve seen to date. It is a fun way to get a user to engage with your content / advertisement. So check it out for yourself. Just follow the steps below.
Basically the user experience works and looks like this:
1. Print out the marker PDF
This goofy looking symbol in the middle is the actual marker. For AR to work, it needs to be a very stark and iconic looking design so that the AR web app can recognize this pattern from everything else in view of the web cam.
2. Hold the marker up to a computer connected to the Internet with an attached web cam and with a web browser open to this specific page that will bring the AR experience to life.
This is what a user has to do with the marker. They literally hold the piece of paper up to their web cam and then the AR web app springs into life blurring the real world with the virtual world
3. Once the AR web app recognizes the marker, the AR web app loads a predefined series of 3D animation sequences that are triggered by the presence of each unique marker.
This is what the maker image becomes once the AR web app takes over. It become a 3D room that folds out that can be rotated and manipulated by the user by just moving the piece of paper.
Once becoming aware of all the current business uses of Web3D, it is like my eyes have been opened. In just a few days I have run into many apps that are in some way, shape or form utilizing 3D technologies. Here are the most notable ones that I hit:
(4.00 out of 5)
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