Tech Guys Podcast EP 102

Robot Transcription –

Intro: This is Tech Guys Who Get Marketing a podcast, hosted by Tech Guys CEO Michael Cline with, co-host and lead designer with Tech Guys, Thomas Culp.Mike: … augmented reality and I actually just started got sucked into this little path of like oh oh, cyberpunk movies. What am I thinking of? What are we thinking of? Blade Runner? Right? Blade Runner. So solid. You saw the newest one, right?Tom: You know, I haven’t. I have not had a chance to watch it. I own it. But I haven’t watched it yet. You know, it’s one of those things are I was watching the old one in retrospect. And I have to say, I was bored out of my mind.

That Guy Who Does Edits: It’s a good thing. We’re Tech Guys Who Get Marketing and not Tech Guys Who Get Movies.

Tom: All right. So why don’t we hop in here and start talking about augmented reality and how it’s been used in marketing, how it can be used in marketing? Is this something that we should be doing? I think that those interesting topics. You want to start us off?

Mike: Sure, I’ll say something probably completely incorrect that you’ll correct me on.

Tom: I’ll do my best.

Mike: Since you’re up on our point score here right now.

That Guy Who Does Edits: Current score, Tom one Mike zero and the listener 35. Because you get to listen all this fun stuff. And you deserve points to.

Mike: I find augmented reality fascinating. I remember being a kid and going to Disney and they had the big giant ring that you got inside of. And you got to put the VR helmet on and this was like early early VR stuff, and being blown away, like the idea of immersing yourself in an alternative world. And then now we have the Oculus Rift, we have all these VR tools. And when the Oculus DK 2 came out, when the second development came out, I bought one started playing with it. Bought the rift commercial version, the moment those Touch controllers came out, because one of the things I realized was the interface is actually the key challenge here. How we interface with these different worlds is the problem. It’s not the crafting of the world. I mean, we’ve built some amazing three dimensional worlds in different video games over the course of time, to me. Very, very high resolution, amazing stuff has been created right now. But it’s the way we interface with it. And in the VR world, you go away, right? It’s the equivalent of a dream. It’s the equivalent of a vacation. And while that’s all great and dandy and handy, I find it very difficult to connect the productivity environment like some people are using VR headsets for, like an infinitely large desktop. Yeah, that didn’t work for me at all. Actually, kind of like, couldn’t be in that virtual world that long.

Tom: Yeah, it’s anti-productive.

Mike: Yeah, I got anti-productive.

That Guy Who Does Edits: Anti-productive is a word if you hyphenated, or if you look it up on urban dictionary, but I believe the phrase they’re looking for is counterproductive You’ll probably hear them say anti productive at least one or two more times during this podcast.

Mike: I think augmented reality or mixed reality – it’s got a couple different names floating around – is actually going to become the standard, the replacement for the monitor, right. So the monitor that’s on our desk that I’m looking at right now (my dual 26, or 28, whatever these are) this is going away. And the augmented reality headset is going to enable us anywhere. Now, I think the challenge with it, the utility of it, talking about using it for marketing purposes, if we can find the through line of productivity, then I think we can find the real marketing use cases that are going to be accepted and valuable. Think of like Google AdWords, right? The ads weren’t there in the very beginning, because they prove the utility of the tool, the usefulness of the tool, they really understood how people were consuming that information. In order to build an ad component, it was actually useful for people. Like, I could search for, you know, snowshoes and I could find something relevant to me. Actual good snowshoes. Somebody was paying for ads, it ranked to the top, they could afford to because they sold a good product that people wanted. That’s where my mind goes, right. I think we’re going to end up with a very disgusting mess of advertising. Like, I think of what digital advertising was like, back in the 90s, the banners, the the web ring stuff, I mean, there’s weird things back in the day. So that’s my initial take on it. It’s like what’s are thrilled productivity through line with AR, and then we’ll find where that marketing is going to be, you know, it’s going to work.

Tom: Yeah, I think the only thing that I would disagree with on that is that the marketing side of things is going to be a mess. I think it’ll be an initially be a mess. But the only reason for that is because all of these endeavors at this point in time are very, very expensive. So the first iterations of this stuff, when it gets to the immersive level, and quality that you’re talking about, is going to be very, very expensive. And so to offset those costs, it’s going to fall on the it’s gonna, all that cost is going to fall on advertisers, I mean, it’s just how these things usually work.

Mike: Elaborate on that. I don’t totally follow you.

Tom: So if you’re going to, I mean right now, if you wanted to implement an AR campaign, you had to figure out it’s immensely expensive, because you have to a higher team to determine what is your campaign look like? And what is our what is our augmentation that we’re doing? So are people coming into a physical space and using their phones, because right now, that’s the only real viable way that you can interact with things is you have to use your phone or tablet, worst case scenario, a laptop. Say it again.

Mike: And you’re holding it up in front of your face.

Tom: Right! So you’re right, again it comes down to that it’s the total opposite of productive, but it’s also expensive, because you have to hire a team to come up with that campaign, people have to develop assets that will make sense in the physical space of which has been presented, somebody scans the QR code, and it pops up an ad or additional information on their phone. And so it just becomes a quicker way for people to get more information about a good or something like that is the easiest thing. But even that, doesn’t necessarily display, it doesn’t necessarily overlay, information like in a 3D environment, which is what Apple’s AR kit is helping people to do, right? I would still call that augmented reality.

Mike: Yeah, you know, what’s interesting, too, is that jumping off point is QR codes, right? Like, you know, in the United States culture, we have not embraced QR codes, yet an Asian culture…

That Guy Who Does Edits: For returning listeners, you’ll remember that last time, Mike also talked about Japan. I think this is where he does most of his research.

Mike: …and other parts of the world, QR codes are a very standard way that you interact with something. I found that really interesting because AR is really just the extension of what the QR code kind of tag approach is.

Tom: Right, and you think about it as that of something that you pull out your device to do. It’s something that your device is always doing.

Mike: Yep.

Tom: And that’s why, you know, Google Glass was a really interesting experiment, I think its ultimate failure was because it never really made it out of the enclaves where it felt too intrusive. So it never made it out to the general public. It stayed all kind of clustered, in this very small part of the world. Unless I’m wrong? I could be wrong.

That Guy Who Does Edits: Quick google search shows, that one of the biggest reasons it was a miserable failure was because it was sold online exclusively to a specific group of people called Google explorers. This could actually contribute to Tom being correct here, and may also gain him a point.

Tom: Wouldn’t be the first time. And it just became this all consuming thing, as opposed to being a natural thing. Like, I’ll be honest, living in the Midwest, I have never met somebody with Google Glass, never did. I saw people wear it, you know, on live streams. And it was, it was this thing that seemed really cool. But then when you actually saw the implementation of it, it was so underwhelming. But the idea, going back to the expense, the expense of these endeavors are quite great, because there’s no real toolset the equivalent of let’s say, Google Docs or MailChimp or, you know, these other tools, really inexpensive tools that people can use to implement something that used to cost a lot of money to do. So there’s no tool set that I know of – actually, there may very well be some tool – that allow me to drag and drop to create a super basic AR campaign that people can come to a physical place and interact with. It’s an expensive endeavor. And so, even when you get to the next step, where you know, we have really, really good wearables that make the physical scanning and the physical representation in front of you a seamless thing that does become productive. Before we even get to that point, the marketing side has to get proven out that this is something that spending money on is productive.

Outro: This has been a podcast by Tech Guys Who Get Marketing. You can find us at techguys.co or techguyswhoget marketing.com. If you like what you heard, please remember to rate review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. Thank you. And remember, feed the robot.