McDonald’s and the gold rush to fill virtual reality with ads

The first thing I see when I put on the HTC Vive virtual reality headset is a McDonald’s Happy Meal. It’s floating by itself against a blank white backdrop, gesturing toward me with its unmoving smile and a dog-like eagerness. With my two hands now firmly grasping the Vive’s mushroom-shaped motion controllers, I reach out for it, and prepare to let McDonald’s show me the capitalist dystopian side of VR, where the only limit is how many logos your eyes can take in at once.

VR promises to change our relationship with what’s real, giving us otherwise impossible experiences and sensory escapades into the unknown. At SXSW 2016, McDonald’s is reminding us that VR will just as easily be a vehicle for corporate consumption. Like the early web being irreversibly branded by the banner ad, VR too will face its own unique struggle with the forces that wish to monetize and market with it.

For context, I’m at the McDonald’s Loft — the fast food chain’s outpost here in Austin, located across the street from the Convention Center in the heart of Brandland. At SXSW, which is part music and film festival and part technology-fused marketing extravaganza, every brand under the sun wants to form more lasting relationships with consumers by helping them “have experiences.” Usually those are in the form of trailers, food trucks, art installations, or “one-of-a-kind concert experiences” — basically, anything at all that may result in an organic social media post.

McDonald’s VR demo isn’t in service of anything really, except as an opportunity to try the Vive, the most immersive and expensive of several soon-to-be-released headsets. There’s no fast food theme or any kind of internal narrative. I’m not battling the Hamburglar, or helping Grimace assist Ronald in getting kids to drink soda. Instead, with the headset firmly over my eyes, the Happy Meal teleports me into an ambiguous three-dimensional landscape covered with white canvas.

In one hand is a paint wheel and in the other a morphing paint brush that turns into a paint gun with the press of a trigger. I’m told to draw and make a mess, and that’s about it. All the while, McDonald’s logos flash at me from all sides and the elusive Happy Meal drifts about waiting for me to throw some color on it. The whole affair lasts less than few minutes. Afterwards, I’m ushered from the large glass cube, where I had been on display for passersby, to a GIF-making booth. McDonald’s is nice enough to post lengthy release placards at the entrance, reminding everyone that anything they do in the loft can be photographed or filmed and used later for promotional purposes, including our bumbling about in VR.

Of course, this isn’t the first VR “game” used as a marketing tool. HBO has gone to great lengths to design various VR experiences for Game of Thrones, and movie studios like Legendary are now premiering special trailer-style VR clips through dedicated mobile apps for Google Cardboard. Nearly every company with enough tech-savvy members on its marketing team is looking at VR to hawk new products.

Just last week, Los Angeles-based startup Immersv launched its VR ad platform with the aim of porting over techniques made popular on smartphones. “Advertising in VR is still in its very nascent stages, but based on the early consumer response to our ad units, it is clear that VR-based video ads work extremely well,” CEO Mihir Shah told Variety. According to Shah, Immersv’s ads have completion rates around 80 percent, which is roughly double that of regular mobile video ads.

And so don’t be surprised if your first trip into VR is sponsored by the Golden Arches. Advertisers have unfettered development access to a platform as promising as the web before a large majority of users can even try it. Facebook, which owns industry pioneer Oculus VR, has been gearing up for months now to present users with 360-degree video ads tailored to work both in your browser and through a VR headset. The company is already partnering with Mountain Dew, Nestle, and other thirsty big-name brands eager to get in on the ground floor of a new gold mine.

With the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive coming out this spring, this type of marketing will only accelerate. If there’s a benefit of campaigns like McDonald’s virtual Happy Meal, it’s that they serve to temper our expectations around VR. Having access to reality-shaping technology has infinite possibilities. But marketers see the possibilities too, and this time when they blast our retinas with immersive new ad formats, the messages will be harder to escape than ever.