Bank of America is using virtual reality to demonstrate impact of VR for its B2B customers.
“We’re using the medium to tell the story,” says Nancy Brennan, global head of marketing for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “We’ve been thinking about this for over a year, and wanted to present it in a scenario where it made sense.”
The VR video, which debuted this spring, was created to bring a report on artificial reality by Sarbjit Nahal—head of thematic investing at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research—to life. The report, “Future Reality,” makes the case for investing in VR and AR technologies and outlines why businesses need to capitalize on these disruptive technologies.
The VR video has been shared at proprietary events with clients and employees. “Many were experiencing VR for the first time—it opened up their imaginations for what it might mean,” says Brennan.
Online, the video has been promoted through Bank of America’s owned social channels and a paid media campaign on Bloomberg.com. It can be viewed online via desktop or mobile, where users can tilt their phone for a true 360° experience.
The goal, says Brennan, was to give clients the feeling of a one on one meeting with Nahal. “We hope they’ll go to the website and download the VR report but we really wanted it to be a visually engaging experience.”
Bank of America worked with a number of its agencies on the VR project, including GroupeConnect and BrandUnion. Ripple Collective produced the video.
ROI is being judged by the number of downloads, engagements and impressions, to gauge the success of it raising brand awareness.
The launch tweet announcing the VR campaign had the highest engagement for a single tweet in 2017 for the Bank of America Merrill Lynch handle (@bofaml), and represented 15% of total engagements for the year. A tweet about a VR-related poll had the most votes ever for such a tweet on all of the Bank of America brand Twitter handles, including Merrill Lynch, US Trust and BofA. And, video views on the Bank of America Merrill Lynch VR website has surpassed 40% of the company’s 2016 total video views.
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