Jargon Buster

A VR experience that takes place outside the home—in a movie theater, mall, amusement park, etc. In location-based VR, a user is wearing a head mounted display and the location itself is designed in a way to heighten the experience further (i.e. if the user walks past a virtual air conditioner, they will feel cold air). One of the benefits of location-based VR is that it provides the user the opportunity to interact with other people. While these experiences have less scale, they can be a value add for advertisers in terms of additional foot traffic and word of mouth from visitors.

An advertisement or service through which an advertiser’s bricks and mortar location can be identified based on proximity of the consumer or their preferred location.

Targeting audiences that have some number of attributes in common with an audience of interest. For example, an advertiser may target “look-alikes” of past purchasers, i.e. folks who share demographic or behavioural characteristics of past purchasers, but have not themselves made a purchase.

A mechanism and technology by which a computer can be trained to use existing data and learn how to perform a specific task

MFAs are designed to maximise the number of ads that users are exposed to by including lots of ads on each page and manipulating user journeys so that visitors must click through multiple pages to access content. Because of these characteristics, they offer poor usability for visitors and focus on ad revenue over experience.

A type of AR experience that uses a specific marker in the real world, such as a QR code or an AI learned concept (recognised object) like a “dog”, to trigger the display of AR content. It does require a pre-determined image, pattern, or physical object that is recognised by the camera and image recognition software to launch the AR experience. For example, a consumer could point their device camera at a fast food logo and have one experience, then point their camera in the same app at a retail store logo and experience different AR content that was triggered by the appearance of a different logo.

Markerless AR technology is used to recognize patterns or features in an environment that were not previously provided to the application, enabling, for instance, a consumer to scan a real world environment like a tabletop or a room in their apartment using their smartphone camera and virtually place a product there to see how it would look.

Derived from eye-tracking experiments, Route has defined the distance from which posters can be seen. This varies, and is dependent on the dimension of the frame. A larger frame will have a longer visibility distance.

Media Smart is the advertising industry’s media literacy programme providing free information and resources to help teach children and young people about advertising. The IAB is a supporting member.