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Immersive technology is revolutionizing digital marketing by creating more engaging, efficient customer experiences and driving unprecedented conversion rates in ecommerce.
In this episode of Marketing Vanguard, host Jenny Rooney sits down with Karina Kogan, CMO of Infinite Reality, to explore the evolution from consumer brand marketing to B2B innovation in immersive experiences.
Discover why traditional ecommerce funnels are ready for disruption, how brands can leverage 3D environments to drive engagement, and why meeting consumers in their preferred digital spaces is crucial for modern marketing success.
“I actually discourage overly studying competition because I actually think it kills creativity and kills innovation,” she says on the podcast. “I think you do need peripheral vision.”
Whether you’re navigating the transition from 2D to 3D marketing or seeking ways to create more impactful customer experiences, this conversation offers valuable insights into the future of digital brand engagement and virtual commerce.
Previously holding leadership roles at Peloton, Oura, and Turner Broadcasting, Karina now helps brands create engaging three-dimensional experiences to enhance customer engagement. Her work with major brands like J.Crew, Benefit Cosmetics, and Ralph Lauren shapes the future of virtual commerce.
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Key takeaways:
[06:32] From Consumer Marketing to B2B Technology — Karina explains her transition from consumer brands to B2B: “One of the things that I experienced as someone running marketing, and running specifically demand generation, from Peloton to Oura to Pvolve is conversion rates in ecommerce are terrible.” This frustration led her to seek out new technologies that could improve the customer experience and drive better results.
[12:51] The Evolution of Immersive Media — Karina draws a compelling parallel between early online video adoption and today’s immersive technologies: “The analogy I like to use is so a very long time ago, I used to work in early phases of online video, even before YouTube was bought by Google. Most of online video was user-generated content, [which] for most older generations, Boomers, Gen Xers, was kinda weird.” She explains how similar barriers in hardware, software, and content quality that once limited online video adoption are now being overcome in immersive experiences.
[18:03] The Business Case for Immersion — Karina articulates why immersive experiences make business sense: “What they’ve found was your brain literally lights up, and then the likelihood that you have higher recall of an experience that you were more emotionally or viscerally connected to is higher.”
[24:43] Brand Experience Without Disruption — Describing Infinite Reality’s approach to white-labeling: “I feel strongly about this for my other marketers in crime, the marketing mafia, because some similar software providers out there, and they insist on burning their logo into [products]. And I just find that such a break of the fourth wall … it should never feel like someone else is in the room with the customer.”
[29:50] Innovation vs. Competition — On her leadership philosophy and approach to competition: “We’re in such a new blue sky in a very mature category where there’s hundreds of competitors or even a dozen competitors. When you’re innovating, when you’re building something new, nobody at a disruptive company says our goal is to be a disruptive company. But those disruptive companies, what makes them disruptive is they don’t look at how everybody else is doing it. They find a new way to do the same thing everybody else has been doing the old way.”
