As you may have read in Campaign, today we’re launching Make My Day, the world’s first augmented performance marketing agency. Founder and Managing Director, Will Scougal, is one of the foremost experts in creative AR – in this blog, he talks about partnering with We Are Social to lead an AR marketing revolution.
Imagination. You can’t create something new without it. Throughout my career, I’ve always believed that the instinctive and intuitive ability of people to harness imagination and turn it into action is what has led to breakthrough moments in our industry. While that might sound straightforward and obvious, the art of having ideas, exploring them and bringing them to life is often a lot harder than it sounds. Today, I couldn’t be more excited to be launching a brand new agency – Make My Day – in partnership with We Are Social, an agency and team that embodies the very idea of turning imagination into action. We Are Social defined social media for a generation of advertisers and Make My Day aims to define augmented reality marketing.
The idea behind Make My Day is simple. We use augmented reality to bring brands into people’s lives in meaningful ways. Whether that’s through the experience itself or the impact it has on the brand. We call it augmented performance marketing.
Over the 7 years I spent at Snapchat, I developed a firm belief that augmented reality is set to become one of the most important and powerful formats in a brand’s asset kit. Everything that marketers, creatives, strategists – ad people – know makes great, effective advertising exists in AR in abundance – high attention, hyper relevance, scale, and yet it currently gets treated like a one off innovation tactic, or ‘nice to have’.
Augmented reality is the new reality for brands. There is an incredible opportunity to remove the misconception around AR and build an infrastructure to serve as the core creative media channel for performance marketing. You don’t have to look far to see that some of the world’s biggest innovators are turning their eyes, and investments, to the future of AR. In an interview, Tim Cook said augmented reality is “a critically important part of Apple’s future”. There are over 1 billion people actively engaged in AR on the world’s biggest social platforms – half of those on Instagram, over a quarter daily on Snapchat, and on TikTok, where one in four posts feature AR effects. Meta and Snap showcase the success stories of AR, highlighting its added value in campaign performance and its ability to drive outsized results in comparison to video.
At the moment, AR is experiencing what all previous new-to-market formats have faced – perceptions of complexity – whether that’s production, cost, scalability, targeting, results. The antidote to complexity is simplicity, and this is the exact premise behind Make My Day – to remove the complexity in AR and to make it easy for clients to realise the potential of the most exciting, effective, immersive ad format available today. Make My Day removes the complexity in AR to bring brands into people’s lives in meaningful ways.
Make My Day is based in We Are Social’s London office, and it’s already been a career highlight to set up the agency with the support of its talented team and its leaders including UK CEO Jim Coleman, Founder Nathan McDonald, and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Mobbie Nazir. Together with my trusted partner and Strategy Director, Mark Carroll, we have the chance to build a creative business from the ground up, with clear and purposeful values embedded from the start. With an ambition to turn AR into the best performing digital ad format, we will help brands connect with the most engaged audience on mobile.
If you want to find out more about what Make My Day can do for your brand, contact Will, Mark and the team here.
