In the span of a few seconds, Patrón’s new augmented reality app creates a miniature hacienda on iPhones that replicates the distillery in Jalisco, Mexico, where the brand’s tequila is made—complete with a virtual bartender and a tiny agave field. At first glance, The Patrón Experience—one of many branded apps built using Apple’s recently launched ARKit platform—may seem like a gimmick, but Patrón has bigger plans for its latest mobile innovation. The spirits company wants to eventually turn augmented reality into an ecommerce platform of sorts by selling tequila through platforms like Amazon and alcohol-delivery site ReserveBar.
“In the future, imagine you’re in a VR or AR experience, a bartender has made you a cocktail based on your preferences and now you can click and that cocktail is being sent to you,” said Adrian Parker, vp of marketing at Patrón Spirits. “We’re not too far from that—I’d say we’re 12 to 18 months away.”
As platforms like Apple, Facebook and Snapchat open AR to the masses, Patrón isn’t the only brand betting on the technology. Ikea, MTV and Kate Spade New York are cashing in on AR and analyzing new sets of data to gauge their success. Within one day of Patrón’s app launch, Google searches for the words “tequila” and “Patrón” increased by 100 percent, and the app has been downloaded about 600 times in the past month. The brand is busy crunching stats on time spent in-app and shares while looking for ways to map the specific parts of the app people engage with the most.
“It’s a very consistent process to what you would consider a sales funnel,” Parker said. “We get top-line data now [and] one of our big goals is that we get a little bit more visibility into the functionality within the app so we can understand what are the hot spots, what are they interacting with, is there a product that they’re interacting with more?”
Still, branded apps have a reputation for struggling to gain momentum, since they require consumers to go through the steps of downloading and using an app. Apple is also notoriously stingy when it comes to giving data back to developers and brands, which is why Nestlé, MTV and Kate Spade New York have all chosen to work with third-party AR app developers that already have millions of users and data.
This week, London-based startup Vyking is launching an AR platform that plugs facial-recognition ads that look like Snapchat lenses into a handful of publisher apps including Mail Online, Dailymotion and PicsArt, which collectively reach more than 100 million monthly active users. One advertiser, Nestlé’s Perrier, designed a mobile promo that overlays a pair of branded sunglasses on selfies. According to Vyking co-founder Thibault de Procé, 400,000 users are spending an average of 15 seconds with the campaign. “AR for brands is no longer monopolized by Facebook or Snap and now [has] lower cost-entry barriers,” he said.