Interview with Amber Osborne, VR/AR Marketing Strategist

Amber Osborne is an award-winning marketing strategist and consultant working in the field of VR/AR technology. Coming from a background in advertising, marketing, and social media, she helps VR companies develop their brands and drive them to market. The challenges of this position are somewhat unique—taking the hardware and software products designed and built and selling them to an audience that hasn’t fully embraced the new technology. Why should I give it a chance? How will it benefit me? Is it just another needless (and expensive) distraction in my already hectic life? Amber is also an avid fan of science fiction, so it was a perfect fit to get her thoughts.

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88 Names: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do as a VR/AR Marketing Strategist, and how did you wind up in this industry?

Amber: I’m originally from the sunny, paved over orange groves of Florida, living in a small town outside of Tampa called New Port Richey.

Currently I live in Seattle. The story of how I got here and into VR has been quite the interesting journey of happy accidents. Growing up I always was quite the music enthusiast and started promoting local bands in high school. That led me to doing artist and album promotion for various record labels and Live Nation in college. After college and some soul searching I ended up co-founding a small boutique social media marketing agency when Twitter was new back in 2008.

Working in social media opened up the world of technology to me. One random Twitter conversation later, I ended up taking a huge risk and moved to Seattle helping create the rules for the machine learning behind an A.I. driven social media platform called Meshfire and became the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder leading the product, content marketing, and community management. Being around the emerging technology scene for a few years, I ended up joining a local startup, Doghead Simulations, that was tackling something new—building a business and education focused collaboration platform for Virtual Reality called rumii. They had the platform but needed product marketing help and that’s how I ultimately ended up in the VR space.

As a VR marketing strategist now, I help companies that have built Virtual or Augmented Reality platforms or apps go beyond the development phases into building their brand, fostering their communities, finding their go to market fit –which is tough when the market is so new—and building strategies around their current marketing efforts.

88 Names: How do you define virtual reality? Is it a gaming platform or is it something more?

Amber: It’s more than just a personal entertainment system—I often refer to Virtual Reality as a personal experience system. Virtual Reality, almost like music, is a medium that can transport you to another place, allowing you to disconnect from whatever your reality may be and enrich yourself in experiences—either as a personal experience for yourself or a social experience with others. Games will always be a foundational entry point to the consumer adoption of Virtual Reality, but the core of virtual reality—that many miss out on when first diving into a headset—lies within creating experiences of personal value that enrich your life in some way. That value can be anything from working out in a VR fitness app like Supernatural, being able to express your creativity in Tiltbrush, to being able to connect with family and friends in virtual 3D space that is more interactive and memorable than a video call. Ultimately, there should be no gatekeepers on what Virtual Reality as a platform should be to an individual. If you like to play games in VR that’s great too—you should get to define what your virtual reality experience looks like.

88 Names: Currently, what are the effects of VR technology on our world? What are the trends in society and culture that originate in the development of VR technology? We’re conducting this interview during the essential nationwide quarantine due to COVID-19. We have seen some individuals and businesses shift meetings and social activities online, including through some VR platforms. What creative ways have you seen VR respond to this period in time? Do you think this will have any lasting effect on the VR industry?

Amber: I’ve always been interested in new mediums for creative expression and human connection. I think this also why I found social media and machine learning so alluring on their cusps of melding into the mainstream. Emerging and disruptive technologies like Virtual Reality have fascinated me—almost as organic living creatures always evolving and being shaped by their adoption through society and culture. There will be constant peaks and valleys in the baby step years of what people start using and how they use it. Predicting the bigger picture societal value beyond the trends is tricky, there’s always something that pushes people to use a product and that’s usually some kind of dopamine release. We all thought Twitter was dumb in the early days until someone else from across the globe responded back on how much they liked us talking about what we had for breakfast. In today’s modern world with many people being isolated, society is hungry for experiences that we lack in everyday life now or an escape from the mundane. I believe that this moment—that market analysts could have never predicted—helps push a lot of people into headsets.

88 Names: What challenges do you face as a marketer of a technology that is growing but hasn’t fully come into everyday usage?

Amber: Honestly, most of my career in Virtual Reality is telling people to put the “facecomputer” on their head, they might like it, and that it most likely won’t make them sick. It’s always such a good feeling to have people experience that “Wow!” moment in VR, but getting them just to get in the headset is a challenge.

Education, Education, Education. People have expectations, people have fears of new technology, and people generally want something that is a good return on investment and won’t drain their bank accounts. Teaching companies and people how to best educate their target markets their value and that there’s more uses to VR beyond gaming. Now that standalone headsets are becoming more affordable, you don’t need the huge expensive gaming rigs to get into VR. But now it is “good luck trying to get the hottest headset because they are sold out everywhere” conundrum.

On the other side of things, marketing to a VR savvy audience is also tough: there’s the “6DOF (Six Degrees of Freedom) or GTFO” crowd; there’s the “VR IS DEAD” rabble rousers; there’s always a wave of critics inside the industry that many of the little folks and studios have to fight through just to get people already that have the headsets interested in what they have built.

88 Names: How does fiction, including books like Matt’s 88 Names, shape the development and use of VR technology? Both among developers of the technology and in the popular general consciousness?

Amber: Fiction has always given us ways to spark imagination of what could be, or a mirror to err on the side of caution of where we could go if technology is used in a more nefarious manner or not respected or governed. I’m an avid reader of Philip K. Dick myself and have been amazed about how predictive his novels and other science fiction have been even in the past few years. I personally don’t want to see the future of the Ready Player One style O.A.S.I.S with everyone in headsets for the entire day and letting the world and their human relationships go to crap around them while they try to build an entire life inside a false reality. Our lifestyles can be enhanced by VR, it should be supplemental and not “oh it’s 8am, let me get in my headset for 8 hours and ignore my family.” Escapism is welcomed, but when it becomes consuming to the ultimate experience and gift we have been given—that is life—is where we always need to draw the line as technologists and own up to the responsibilities as creators and pioneers to set up proper regulations and guidelines.