IronSource Launches Augmented Reality Advertising Platform for Mobile Games

As a new medium of digital entertainment, augmented reality and Virtual Reality like new potential land for advertisers. Previously we have seen how Advrty tries to execute the concept native advertising in VR. This time it's turn IronSource who announced platform new AR-only ad.

As Advrty said before, designing advertisements in the AR medium is not an easy job because settingit involves a very diverse user environment. This may also be the reason why IronSource's offering so far still seems quite modest.

One of the ads, based on VentureBeat's observation, involved characters from a game which appears at the location where the user is (viewed through the phone screen of course), similar to the one found in game Pokemon Go. The user is then confronted with a mini game, with missions such as throwing fireballs at the character.

After playing mini game AR, then the user is faced with a screen to download game advertised. Reflecting on Pokemon Go is a good decision, at least for now, considering game this is the easiest example for consumers to understand the concept of AR.

The interactions offered are also clearly more engaging rather than just showing ads banner in an AR scene. In addition, IronSource also ensures that the advertisements displayed are not intrusive.

The reason is because before the ad is shown, the user has already interacted with the version augmented from the surrounding environment. These AR ads will only enrich the experience, not take the user to another experience as if confronted with pop-up ad.

For now, developer can't create their own AR ads on platform IronSource. All ads are produced by IronSource's own Playworks Studio division, with 3D assets acquired from advertisers' clients.

After being done by a team of graphic designers, animators, programmer, designer game to data scientist, the ads will be released to the network utilizing IronSource's SDK, which so far includes more than 80 thousand integrations. This is what IronSource's main weapon is, namely the penetration of AR ads on a fairly large scale.

IronSource is pretty sure AR ads can be applied to a variety of verticals, like for example retail. However, they judged that developer and mobile game publisher will be early adopters on this new AR-based ad format.

Sumber: VentureBeat and IronSource.