Tony Parisi is the Head of AR/VR Ad Strategy at Unity Technologies, and he’s committing to taking an ethical approach to advertising. Much of the advertising at Unity is done within the context of a mobile game, and so there is less pressure to fingerprint and profile individual users. I talked to Parisi about how he draws the line of what to track and what not to track, and he said that currently they’re tracking very little of individual users and rather focus on embedding ads within the context of a game. In free-to-play games, players are gated with ads that they have to watch in order to get back to their game, which means that they have an extraordinarily high completion rate of their ad units.
I also talked to Parisi about his efforts in augmented reality advertising, and how a lot of advertising agencies are being asked to define their AR strategy now that AR Kit and AR Core are being deployed on millions of phones and tablets. There is more and more of a market to explore what’s possible with AR ads, and he shares some of the highlights and types of AR ads that are working well. There’s more and more ways that immersive storytelling are starting to be integrated within the advertising space, and battery draining intensity of AR is less of concern with these short-form experiences that are also limited to around 5 MB in size. It’s still relatively new medium and communications modality, and so Parisi is spending a lot of time networking and educating advertising agencies in New York City.
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Music: Fatality
