“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”
– John Keats
Last week Unity Technologies hosted its annual developers conference, Unite, in Los Angeles. While the general public may not be aware, Unity is the engine under the hood of the games and apps we engage with every day. With the new products and services that were announced at Unite LA, Unity is poised to dominate our digital world over the course of the next few years.
You may not know it now, but you’ve likely experienced something built in Unity. Snuck in a game of Words with Friends or Angry Birds recently? How about an AR or VR experience? Maybe you caught those shiny new Lexus LC 500 TV spots or saw Spielberg’s latest film Ready Player One? Unity is the real-time engine behind all of them, and has apps installed on over 1 billion devices worldwide, reaching almost 75% of US consumers every month.
Introducing AR Ads
One of Unity’s biggest announcements at Unite LA was their Ads Software Developer’s Kit (SDK) 3.0. Unity developers install the SDK to embed programmatic ad placements in strategic moments, which adds an additional layer of monetization for their app. The shining innovation here is their Augmented Reality (AR) Ads platform, which lets users launch snackable and highly interactive AR experiences. With this platform, brands won’t have to build a custom AR app to give consumers an AR experience, it can be activated right from an in-app ad unit. At the announcement event at Unite LA, I had the pleasure of speaking about the role of Advertisers and AR to preview what the future of AR-enabled ads could look like for brands. Since the user is the focus of an AR ad, there is unlocked potential for brands to create memorable experiences.