Experiential Advertising&trade -- Our Early Days

With all of the talk about advertising in virtual worlds, I thought that I would bring back some of our early work in virtual reality. I used to speak all the time on the topic of using virtual reality to create experiences that allowed the consumer to enter and interact with a marketing message at conferences both in the US and abroad.

Back in 1991, the CyberEvent Group (my first company) used virtual reality to create Experiential Advertising&trade programs for clients ranging from Avis to Cutty Sark. Clients included the City of Avignon Festival, People Magazine, USA Network, Westwood One Radio Network, American Express, Merrill Lynch and the Grateful Dead.

CyberEvent Group also produced many of the major national tours that used virtual reality, including the award winning Cutty Sark Virtual Voyage, grand opening tours for Blockbuster stores and won a MARCOM Award for Best Trade Show Exhibit with our Immersive Animation Theatre for Cabletron Systems.

Back then, we used Head-mounted display's and computers the size of a small refrigerator, like the SGI RealityEngine. But the idea behind what we were doing then and what's happening today was the same. To engage people in a more compelling, authentic and relevant manner. We needed to let people step into the advertisement, not just tell show it to them. And what was on the bleeding edge in 1991 can be just as difficult for people to understand today. Funny, I just came across this quote from an article about VR in 1995. Kinda' amazing how little has changed, isn't it!

"Plus, a lot of ad agency people I've spoken to are intimated by the process of creating a VR experience. The trick is understanding the non-linear aspects of VR. And in the advertising world, that's an enormous, cognitive leap."

So take a look at the rest of the pictures of our early VR work by clicking on the link below. And if you've been to our offices and seen those big, grey things and scratched your head wondering what they were, they were the Virtuality systems that we used to truck all over the country!

Boy, we sure had a lot of fun back then!

Link: Experiential Advertising.