(Virtual) reality bites
(Virtual) reality bites
Product launch marketing campaign · Thomson Reuters · 2018
In short. Trading desk users wanted more visual data than their screens could hold. I pitched virtual reality as the answer, then promoted the trial by running a technology conference inside VR, with cardboard headsets posted to the guest list. The campaign hit every number it was set. The product was shelved anyway.
Market research and client roundtables had surfaced a specific, unglamorous problem: certain user segments wanted more visual financial data, and they had run out of screen to put it on.
Product Design worked the problem through conventional means. Tabular layouts. Smaller UI elements. Summarised views. Every one of them traded away the salience of the data that mattered most, which for a trading desk is the only thing that matters.
I wrote a pitch for a product design involving virtual reality. Headsets and all. The idea was to give the desk a fully customisable environment where they were surrounded by the data rather than squinting at it. Product built an MVP.
Nobody had asked marketing for a product idea. I was supporting product and content marketing, not designing the roadmap. Proposing a VR headset-based trading environment to a financial data business meant making a case that would be easy to laugh at, to people whose careers did not benefit from being associated with a gimmick.
A trial nobody could picture. You cannot explain an immersive environment in an email. The entire proposition was experiential, and every conventional channel we had was flat.
Two audiences, one launch. The end users had to want it. The commercial buyers had to fund it. Those are different arguments, and a novelty product loses the second one quickly.
Marcomms supporting a product team is usually handed a finished proposition and asked to make it land. I asked to be involved earlier than that - hosting client listening sessions, runnung product surveys, supporting the roundtables and requesting to receive the usage analysis, where you hear what people actually do rather than what the roadmap says they need.
That is where the VR idea came from. Not from a creative session, but from a recurring, unremarkable complaint: these users wanted more visual data and had run out of screen. Nobody in those rooms was asking for virtual reality. They were describing a constraint, repeatedly, and Product was solving it within the constraint rather than removing it.
The pitch I wrote was only possible because I had heard the problem raised dozens of times in the users' own words. Marketing that arrives after the proposition is fixed can polish it. Marketing that arrives before it can occasionally change what gets built.
This was the call that mattered. Rather than advertise a virtual reality product through conventional channels, I partnered with a creative agency to run the flagship promotional event inside virtual reality - a full technology conference in a white-labelled virtual environment they built for us.
We distributed simple branded cardboard headsets that needed nothing but a mobile phone and our event app. No hardware investment, no procurement conversation, no reason to say no and every reason to say: "Hmm, why not?" The barrier to experiencing the thing was reduced to opening a package.
The logic was straightforward. If the product's value could only be understood by being inside it, then the campaign had to put people inside it.
Email marketing to the target segments. In-product digital advertising on the existing platform, reaching users where they already worked. Paid placements in a technology publication and a financial news title. Client invitation copy for Go-To-Market teams to distribute and sales enablement battlecards to support the conversations and help the commercial teams carry the story.
I worked with the Events Marketing function on the conference programme itself, holding tone and style consistent across the whole thing and carving out specific spaces within the virtual venue for demoing the product.
Around 75% attendance from direct outreach, which is a rate you rarely see for a virtual event.
Hundreds of app downloads and unique visitors. Strong attendance across the conference programme, positive anecdotal feedback, and some qualified enquiries.
The campaign achieved every goal it had been set.
But the product was shelved.
It was perceived as a novelty. Cost per marketing qualified lead was prohibitive, and forecast customer acquisition cost meant the campaign and event could not run at scale. The product itself was a small upsell against existing annual recurring revenue, and clients flagged the initial investment and training requirement as barriers to adoption. The economics did not work, and no amount of campaign performance was going to change that.
A campaign can hit every metric it was given and still be the wrong campaign. Attendance, downloads and engagement told us people were curious. They told us nothing about whether anyone would pay, and I had not built anything into the plan that would.
Since then I set commercial expectations alongside campaign objectives at the brief stage, not at the review. If a product's realistic CAC makes a channel unviable, that is worth knowing before you commission the creative rather than after the event.
I also took away real experience in corporate brand strategy, budget management and events orchestration that I have used on every campaign since — most directly on a pensions research programme that reached a narrow, commercially qualified audience for only £25,000.
And, for a gadget enthusiast such as myself, I got to keep my cardboard headset.
Disciplines: Product marketing · Content and brand marketing · Event and experience · Campaign strategy · Sales enablement · Agency management
Sector: Enterprise technology
> Patient money - The same product campaign architecture, several years and many campaigns later, with the commercial question answered first.