Maarten Lens-FitzGerald tells WPP Stream conference why AR is good for brands... but they won't have it all their own way.
Will mobile augmented reality become a mainstream technology in the future? The fact that mobile AR company Layar thinks so is hardly news, but the company's reasoning makes for interesting reading.
Layar's Maarten Lens-FitzGerald recently gave a talk at global agency WPP's Stream conference, in which he explained why the company believes AR is 'the equalizer'. The company has posted a transcript of his talk on its website.
In it, Lens-FitzGerald talks about the explosion in communication and advertising, with 'predation by advertisers' counteracted by new tools for people, including ad blockers and spam filters.
"Yet there is one tool ready to play the most important role in the fight for truth and clarity in the explosion of communication: It's the mobile phone," he said, stressing the way modern smartphones are connected to the internet and to social networks, and through AR are gaining vision.
"The phone can see. This ability to see, combined with the power of the web, its content and its tools plus the social graph, will make it unstoppable in helping individuals make sense of their surroundings to see clearly in the explosion of communication."
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Lens-FitzGerald goes on to talk about how publishers and brands will be able to use AR technology to add content and sharing links to their print materials - Layar's new Vision feature will do exactly that - but that they won't have all the control.
"People will be smart and combine web content with products, like augmenting the chicken product with the Associated Press article that there is antibiotics it the chicken. Brand managers had ultimate control over their packaging, but not anymore. With Augmented Reality, any information can be put on their packaging, any message, good or bad. Same goes for campaigns," he said.
"At Layar, we foresee this world as a world where all objects are stacked with information. A stack with professional content and with user-generated content. We intend to service both markets: professional content services with Layar to give the brands and publishers a voice, and a product for user-generated content."
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