By: Dan Sullivan
What an army of drone connected, location tracked, VR enabled loyalists means for your brand strategy.
It’s April 1st, and despite the several weeks we’ve had to comprehend them, the recent spree of disparate Facebook acquisitions has caused occasional conjecture and frequent confusion, particularly by those that may be too lazy to pay attention or not forward thinking enough to draw a few basic conclusions.
I’ll connect a few of the most obvious dots concerning three recent Facebook acquisitions, popular messaging service Whatapp, VR pioneer Oculus Rift, facial recognition company Face.com and drone maker Titan Aerospace. To the casual observer, they’re merely a correlating series of somewhat related services that give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. To social marketing mavens and the guru class of influencers (heavy hitters who can boast of achieving more than 100k tweets sent), the roadmap is infinitely clearer.
Facebook is going to use Oculus to have users enabled to access Facebook ads where they couldn’t before, in the real world.
Let’s walk through the pieces first. What’s Whatapp do? It knows precisely where you are, when you’re interacting, and who you’re interacting with. A global fleet of sub-orbital drone planes know what and who else is around you in real time, and can provide high bandwidth streaming internet to a fixed location. Do you still think Facebook spent 2 billion for Oculus so that they can have you look at the same Facebook ads on a slightly different screen in front of the screen you’re already looking at? FACT: Facebook is going to use Oculus to have users enabled to access Facebook ads where they couldn’t before, in the real world. It’s not about plugging them into your computer silly, it’s about using Oculus to plug into the real world, but a different real world significantly enhanced with the people you know and the brands you love in a way you wouldn’t believe possible.
Step one of owning the next generation of Facebook Oculus, never take them off. Facebook’s acquisition of Face.com and their advanced facial recognition and cutting edge optic technology, plus a front facing camera means you’ll never ever have to.
Step one of owning the next generation of Facebook Oculus, never take them off.
Great brand managers know that their true fans see their brand differently. If you’re a brilliant brand manager, you know that you’re brand lives less and less in the TV commercials your audience skips and the radio testimonials they openly mock. Your brand lives in the hearts and minds and streets and living rooms of those who know you best. If you’re Warby Parker, your brand doesn’t live in a glossy insert in the Sunday dead tree newspaper, your brand is a mustachioed individualist making his way across Brooklyn on a unicycle in a blizzard.
Below I’ll explain how the future of brand marketing will work.
I think brand marketers can safely assume first generation Occulus adopters will be uniformly highly influential people. Walking around urban areas with their headsets on. Connected to Whatsapp, Facebook will be able to determine exactly what they’re looking at, for how long, and where they go next for amazing marketing analytics that good customers would be happy to share. Analytics are great, but what, you ask, do I do with them? Confirm where they are and where they cluster with the FB drone fleet, and use these drones to beam streaming experiences directly to their brains, and see exactly what they do next! Take this distributed army of potential customers, and enhance the humdrum of their empty moments with pervasive, snackable brand content and experiences that customers can opt-in to by not opting out.
Imagine a customer in a quiet city park watching her three young daughters frolic aimlessly around the first white flowers of a tree in near dusk in early spring; ten minutes with nothing to do and nothing to talk to. Rather than go into her pocket for Facebook on her phone to kill this dead time, suddenly this becomes an “in-reality” experience with Origins, youth, trees, nature, spring, rebirth, and an incredibly positive brand experience and cash register dollar sign incremental spend profits! Facebook for your Face=brands in your brain!
The Internet of Things is coming, and those Things are people.
The Internet of Things is coming, and those Things are people. This is inevitable, and the only variable is whether you’re the marketing professional who will be able to implement it, or if it’s who they hire to replace you.
April 1st.
It is launching exactly a year from today. Unconfirmed internal sources tell us that all teams are working on an aggressive 12 month launch schedule that was a secret condition of each company’s earn out, a commitment to launch on the very first day of Q215. April 1st, mark your calendars and consider yourself warned.