Augment your marketing efforts: the design of augmented reality experience ads for SME brand

The implementation of augmented reality (AR) in advertising opens up opportunities to boost the efficiency of the advertisements and stimulates a positive reaction from the targeted audience. Past researchers have found that engaging Generation Z (Gen Z) in ads is far more challenging than Generation Y. It is a crucial issue that needs to be highlighted as the spending power of Gen Z has expanded and become the target market for every brand. Furthermore, implementing AR advertising in Malaysia is still vague and warrants further research. Thus, the researchers investigate the user experience (UX) and the acceptance of augmented forms of advertisement among Gen Z. The experiment was conducted in a studio that was participated by the gen Z cohort of university students. The key variables of UX are learnability, effectiveness, memorable, erroneous, satisfaction, and open-ended questions on experience. As a result, a positive reaction among the respondent to the AR advertisement due to ease of use, more information provided in AR content, and exciting ways to attract the audience. The findings have meaningful implications for how the industry can adopt AR as a fascinating effort to attract the audience.