Sun Tzu Series #6 of 10. “Let your plans be dark…..” Glooey, 3D Augmented Realty Games on Beer Ad Logos.
3 Jun
John Rae-Grant, CEO and Founder of Glooey, Inc.
As the Sun Tzu, the brilliant military strategist said about 2,400 years ago in The Art of War: “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as the night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” Augmented reality (AR) as a technology space is still “dark and impenetrable” because it is still in its early stages
On May 21, 2012, I saw John Rae-Grant, CEO and Founder of Glooey, Inc. gave his startup pitch at JumpStartDays (a joint venture between the Keiretsu Forum, the largest angel network in the world, and Max Shapiro of PeopleConnect).
Glooey, based in Redwood City, is one of new players in the AR space. As their first foray into marketing, Glooey is combining their target audiences’ love of beer and 3D games, by placing an interactive game on top of a real world beer logo.
Evolution of Reality. You wake up in the morning, drug and alcohol free. Your cat jumps up on your chest and starts licking your face. That’s reality. You walk downstairs to your custom gaming computer and continue playing League of Legends (Lol). That is virtual reality, a completely simulated world although some avid gamers confuse it with reality. Your fingers cramp up from playing too long and your vision is starting to blur, so you turn on the TV to relax. You are watching the America’s Cup World Series yacht races in Venice, Italy taking place in the Grand Canal. The name of the boat is superimposed over the real yacht as it is racing and and the course boundaries are also superimposed for the benefit of the viewers. That is augmented reality (AR), where artificial information about the real environment can be overlaid on the real world. Got it?
What is Glooey’s AR? We move from 2D augmented reality a.k.a. graffiti (previous blog, GraffitiTech) to 3D augmented reality (Glooey). To quote the founder: “Glooey, Inc. is building mobile/social apps and a promotion platform which enable users, clients, and partners to explore, build, and interact with gloo. We do this by seamlessly mixing recent advances in Augmented Reality, Location Based Services, and smartphone technology to empower users to share social, useful and fun interactive experiences in real world locations, and across social networks.”
LiveLogo? Gloeey’s first promotion platform is LiveLogo, an Augmented Reality Campaign toolkit for Brands. Below is a sample: laying a game (BudBash) over a Budweiser coaster.
Until now, broadcast ads, print campaigns, and swag have been boring and immeasurable. Glooey makes consumers want to see, interact with, save, and spread the brand, and tells the advertiser exactly what is happening along the way. Brands are everywhere: bars, restaurants, cafes. They are on coasters, posters, signs, menus, packaging, and even clothing. After corporations spend billions in advertising to create the brand image attached to these logos and distribute it, the image is static, passive, and worse, immeasurable. (This last paragraphed is paraphrased from the website)
A Smartphone Camera App. “Glooey makes all of these branding elements stickier (“Goo” similar to “Glue”) by overlaying virtual content attached to the logo. Consumers view the brand through a smartphone camera app, and engage directly with the interactive “advertainment” that has been attached. A beer coaster sprouts a branded bar top game; a teaser video bursts through a concert flyer; a branded coffee cup drops down a special Valentine’s Day greeting and a chance to win a trip to Costa Rica.
Glooey’s Image Toolkit: “Using Glooey’s image toolkit corporations create the campaigns that liven their brand:
- Overlaying rich, engaging entertainment experiences on brand elements
- Measuring where, when, and with which brand elements consumers engage
- Tuning the date, time, and place at which experiences appear
- Rewarding the consumer for engaging, and re-engaging
- Creating viral uptake using social media as consumers share what they’ve discovered”
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