What Facebook’s AR Push Means for the Future of Commerce and the Concentration of Power
By Lauren Stacy • April 21, 2017
At this year’s F8 Conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced that AR is Facebook’s next big venture and showed audiences it has the capabilities in place to deliver on this goal. The platform has built an engineering infrastructure that has allowed it to spin out tools and applications and deploy them at extraordinary speed “in a way we don’t think we have seen before”, says Rob Norman, global chief digital officer at GroupM. Matthew Knight, head of strategic innovation at Carat claimed that the examples at F8 “paint a picture of the world being interactive and shoppable – and every brand manager must be falling out of their seat to think about how they can leverage this sort of technology.” For marketers, it doesn’t matter if it is Facebook, Google, Tencent or Alibaba leading the charge; it is all about who can offer the most scale and ease of use to the consumer.