AR has been the marketing department's favourite line item for about six years now. It looks impressive in a deck. It photographs well for a presentation. It implies modernity, cinematic ambition, audience delight. The CMO loves it. The CFO is suspicious. The CFO is usually right.
The honest version: AR earns its place in three specific moments. Outside those moments, it tends to be a vanity charge — a line item that doubles the budget without doubling the outcome. Here are the three. And the four to avoid.
1. The reveal moment
If your launch event has a single cinematic instant — the cover-lift, the curtain-drop, the stage-blast — AR can extend that instant beyond the physical stage. A holobox stage-take, a projection-mapped portal that the product appears to step through, an anamorphic LED wrap that tricks the eye into seeing the product break out of the screen plane.
The criterion isn't can we add AR to this. The criterion is does the moment have a visual story that needs three dimensions to tell. A new car has that story. A new mobile phone has that story. A new SaaS product, almost never.
2. Dealer-journey configurators
The second case is dealer-network education. AR product configurators — let me see this car in red, in interior trim B, with the panoramic roof — work because dealers genuinely use them, repeatedly, with prospective buyers, over the months that follow the launch event.
The maths is simple: an AR configurator at 80 dealerships, used twice a day per dealership, generates roughly 50,000 product visualisations a year. That's measurable funnel impact, not stage theatre.
AR earns its place when it survives the launch night and continues working in the dealership six months later.
3. Post-event amplification
The third case is the social cut. A reveal moment captured for AR-enhanced video — the audience photographing the LED reveal, the social posts that compound earned media — works because the visual format is inherently shareable.
Here too the test is simple: does the AR moment produce the photograph that runs the next morning? If yes, it earns its place. If the moment is impressive in the room but doesn't translate to a 15-second vertical cut, it's a vanity charge.
Where it doesn't earn its place
Now the four moments where AR keeps showing up and shouldn't.
Conference badges
The "scan your badge to unlock an AR experience" moment. The audience is already at the conference. They've already paid attention. The AR adds a step without adding a story. Skip.
Lobby installations as decoration
AR walls in the lobby that loop generic brand visuals. These photograph as decor, not as content. They cost roughly 8× a high-quality video wall and produce roughly 0.5× the audience reaction. The CFO knows this; the CMO is sometimes still being convinced.
Investor-day demonstrations
Investor audiences are sophisticated and time-poor. They want clarity, not stage magic. AR demos in investor settings consistently underperform a confident speaker with a slide deck.
Internal town halls
The audience here is your own employees. They will respect a leadership address; they will roll their eyes at AR theatre. Save it for external moments.
The test
Before approving an AR line item, ask three questions. Does the moment have a story that needs three dimensions? Does the AR keep working past launch night? Does it produce the photograph? If the answer is yes to two of three, it earns its place. If it's yes to fewer than two, you're paying for ambience.