Whether it’s trying on clothes online or a lipstick, there is no question that companies continually find new ways to promote their services and products through extended reality (known as XR technology ).
In fact, ad spend in both augmented and virtual reality is expected to grow very rapidly in the coming years. If in 2019 it reached the figure of 10 billion dollars, and 8 billion in 2020 (in a year motivated by the crisis caused by the current coronavirus pandemic), it could reach 62 billion dollars in 2027 and 100 billion in 2024, respectively.
But, according to researchers at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, in the United States, this new technology could also be an opportunity for those advertisers who use these advances with the purpose of deceiving, manipulating or even harming consumers .
In a study recently known at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, researchers studied the possible ways in which advertisers could manipulate the public, using the construction of different scenarios, in order to investigate possible XR ads that could be created in the future, and what their damages could be.
The team, in turn, identified five key mechanisms of manipulation through XR advertising: inducing artificial emotions; misleading experience marketing; detect and target people at times when they are most vulnerable; distortion of reality and emotional manipulation through hyperpersonalization (understood as advertisements created solely for the individual).
As the experts say, there are actually many ways in which this type of manipulation and deception could manifest itself. “One way could be to distort a consumer’s sense of reality by overlaying graphics on augmented reality glasses to change what they are seeing. For example, a political ad might try to paint a picture of a growing economy and run ads on augmented reality glasses that subtly overlap with graphics that hide or erase evidence of poverty. “
Another possible danger is what’s known as misleading experience marketing . It occurs when a company presents product “advances” through seemingly realistic XR technologies, but users cannot say that the virtual product has been tampered with.
Building the scenario was a two-step process in which the researchers first became familiar with the various XR devices, XR advertising, and finally manipulative advertising, so that they could create much more realistic exercises.
From there, they produced a series of prompts to guide the creation of the scenarios, asking some questions, such as: How could bad actors use an existing XR publicity technique? Could a certain manipulative advertising technique be replicated in XR?
Once this was done, they created scenarios and use cases that demonstrate how future advertising manipulation techniques might manifest through XR.
Since XR technology is still limited, the scientists indicate that most of the damage they examined is not real yet. For example, many of these devices are not yet sophisticated enough to develop political advertisements that provide a different photorealistic perspective to people based on preconceived beliefs.
Hence, they warn that further research would be needed to better understand what impact XR immersive advertising could have on consumers in the not too distant future.
