MTV and the Rise of Augmented Reality Advertising

Earlier this year, Snapchat created an augmented reality filter, the hot dog. This hot dog has become a bellwether for many in the marketing and advertising. The augmented reality hot dog has served as a metric against which firms measure the impact of their immersive product and advertising launches. It also served as blood in the water for augmented reality advertising which promises to increase user engagement times.

The launch of the MTV Moon Person into augmented reality generated 2.4 million views and created almost 20 million impressions in the course of one week across social media. In this era, captivating an audience for three to six seconds is considered a win. Augmented reality advertising had the users spend two, and half minutes inside of the brand experience. The effort was a success because they created the content users wanted to share and created an experience the audience wanted to immerse themselves in.

Viacom Velocity is a branded content studio that is fueled by a possibility of establishing innovative products and initiating a fast-moving creative process for resonating with people. This led to the launch of a small branded content experiment with AR. The goals were educating the team on technology, separating the hype from reality and running an AR experience with the actual consumers. This company works with a simple mantra of creating experiences that prioritize the fans.

New technology has a reputation for being gimmicky, but the solution to that came from a house party with a crowd forming around 8i’s Holo App an augmented reality experience and authoring app. To speed their innovation process, the senior director of social content partnership at Viacom Velocity applied the Lean Startup approach to the product development process.

This meant generating ideas by rapidly prototyping wireframes using simple paper mockups and sharing them among the team members for fast feedback. To support the 2017 MTV Video Music awards the team decided to have the Moon Person — MTV’s most iconic piece of intellectual property — perform a series of five hyper-trending dance moves. The lean approach gave the Viacom Velocity team a chance to tackling a complex project using new technology by breaking down tasks into manageable pieces over a fixed period.

They decided to use one key metric, the average user session length. The session length served as a way to demonstrate how augmented reality and immersive experiences can increase user engagement to drive brand equity and social sharing. The augmented reality Moon person experience now serves as a blueprint for the creation, packaging and the sale of AR opportunities to their clients.