A little thought bubble reflecting insights from the business lunch at the Naturkunde Museum Berlin:

Evoking and creating additional needs is the main purpose of marketing. The current mainstream media-channels determine where advertising and marketing is done. In the past print media, radio, television, and now the internet — have been the top advertising channels of their time.

Currently facebook and google are among the most flourishing business models, since they offer advertising within the internet. They are able to provide this service as they are entry points for the internet. And the internet is where modern costumer conversions take place.

However, the limitation of the internet is that it is not seamlessly integrated into our natural world. without a screen, or holding the smartphone one has no access to the internet. But, augmented reality (AR) offers a intuitive way of how to integrate the digital world into natural human interactions. A technology crucially needed for this step would be google or facebook-classes that integrate virtual objects into our point of view in everyday situations (or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daqri).

As soon as augmented reality becomes viable it would be the future market for advertising. Just like the internet does today, it would determine which hotel you book, what you eat, and where your attention is shifted. Even more, the immersiveness of the interface would lead to a permanent integration of the digital world into everyday decisions. The possibilities seem endless. Now masses of software companies offer tech solutions for building AR apps ( for a list see: www.thinkmobiles.com/blog/best-ar-sdk-review/ ).

And there is a easy entry to this future market! Currently many companies (e.g. http://www.cluetivity.com ) plan to guide humans via phone based augmented reality through museums, cities, or their everyday activity. A early ‚proof of concept‘ was given by ‚pokemon go‘ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go ). They showed that users are willing to navigate through the city based on a phone-app.

Implementing such a business model for a museum or especially zoo has a large degree of scale-ability (for a list see here: http://culture-to-go.com/mediathek/augmented-reality-im-museum/ ). Caution, several competitors tackle the audio-guide market — even though margins are small and overhead high.