Gratuitous Steven Colbert Image nicked from here, many thanks.
Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand, in conjunction with the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, have created an interesting interactive campaign for the Wellington Zoo. Using their mobile phones, readers of the newspaper can point their cameras at a print ad that looks like a simplified QR code and an animal appears in 3-D above the page. AdForum has a short article about the campaign and a good video explaining the concept (although the video can’t be linked to or embedded, guess they aren’t too keen on social media over there).
Go check out the video to get a sense of the ads.
The ads themselves are fairly unremarkable. They just look like clunky graphics of a bear, a giraffe and a cheetah to me. Although it is nice to see they had a reason for using the technology, that is to bring the animals to the people to promote the close encounters exhibit at the Zoo. (Side Note: I can’t help but think walking though New Zealand with a bear or cheetah on a leash would have gotten more attention, but possibly more lawsuits). It is nice to see a new technology being used in conjunction with newspaper advertising, goodness knows it needs all the help it can get.
Honestly, the best part of the campaign is seeing the reactions of people discovering this new form of advertising. I am guessing the shock and delight comes from the novelty of this execution and not from the actual display itself. If this technique were to become widely adopted with this particular example stand out from the crowd? Probably not. It is the technology that is playing the lead role here above the idea, whereas I like to see it the other way around. This campaign does seem to be effective, delivering a 30% increase in visitors.
All in all it is a pretty neat technology to add to the toolbox. Do I believe the video when it says, it is “set to revolutionize advertising as we know it?” Uh, nope. It is exciting to think of the possibilities. In the video they mention increasing the technology to include animation and video as opposed to the static image. What if you made it truly interactive, like a game you could play or clues to a scavenger hunt? What if you made it interactive where participants could store information at a certain site to build a knowledge bank over time or communicate with other participants?
The main problem I have with this technology is it requires a download (already the kiss of death for any interactive campaign). Further complicating matters, it is a download to your phone, activated by a text message. This seems to be asking a lot of the viewing public and quite honestly for not a big payoff. It is something that seems to be universal across all executions in new media, there is a novelty factor, but the idea seems to play second fiddle.