Quartz
Quartz expects to make a handful of AR ads for brands this year.
- Atlantic-owned Quartz is beginning to sell AR ads within its chatbot news app, which has more than one million downloads.
- It's the latest example of how in-house
advertising teams at publishers are experimenting with emerging technology to open new buckets of revenue.
Quartz is betting that advertisers will get on board with augmented reality ads.
In September, Quartz began testing an augmented reality feature in its mobile app that adds interactive graphics to some stories. For example, a story about NASA getting rid of its Cassini spacecraft included a 3D model of the spacecraft that users could play around with through their phone's camera. Now it's turning those AR graphics into ads for marketers, starting with Infiniti.
Quartz's app delivers content through an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that spits out quick nuggets of news stories that look like text messages. It has more than one million downloads since it launched in 2016.
This week, Quartz started slipping an ad for Infiniti between the string of messages that lets users play around with a 3D version of a car from the app. After clicking on the ad, Quartz's app opens to a camera feature which places a virtual car image on top of real world images. People can then can spin around the virtual car in their camera and take a picture with.
A banner at the bottom of the screen links to Infiniti's website with more information about the car.
Here's what it looks like:
Quartz
Quartz wants to get a jump on augmented reality advertising, and establish expertise early
The ad was created by Quartz Creative-the creative services arm of the publisher that experiments with new formats like AR with advertisers. Infiniti is the first advertiser to run an AR ad but marketers such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise have experimented with static ad placements within Quartz's app.
Augmented reality is one way that Quartz is looking to diversify its revenue beyond the so-called branded content that it's known for. Last week, Quartz began selling programmatic ads as part of a partnership with Vox Media-owned marketplace Concert.
According to Mike Dolan, creative director of Quartz Creative, the publisher wanted to test out AR ads with Infiniti because the brand is an existing advertiser and "people like beautiful cars." Unlike display ads that can be quickly created and sold, AR requires more of a white-glove approach. Quartz spent six weeks creating the campaign and Dolan said he expects to create five similar projects for brands this year.
"When we started to have AR in the app, we [thought about] 'is what we're creating going to create be good for the consumer,'" he said. "From what we've seen, everyone is excited about AR and a large percentage of advertisers are curious about how you create it."
Quartz isn't the only publisher experimenting with AR-built ads. Publishers' in-house advertising teams are increasingly acting like advertising agencies that test new technology for brands.
The New York Times created a branded AR app for IBM to promote the film Hidden Figures, f0r instance. At the same time, platforms like Snapchat and Apple's AR Kit have made augmented reality more mainstream, with Snap going so far as to call itself a "camera company" as part of a big shift into AR.