Augmented reality, no doubts about it, is the perfect marketing’s ally: Experenti is an example of this, and there are other countless demonstrations. One of these is the promotion of the new Angry Birds movie: Rovio, producer of the mobile videogame loved all over the world, used augmented reality as a main aspect of its marketing campaign.
The movie will be premiered in cinema soon, but if you are a fan surely already knew about this: Rovio activated a promotional campaign that was hard to miss for the players.
Based on experiential marketing, the campaign took advantage of the experience offered to the fans: for the purpose, Rovio created a brand new game, “Angry Birds Action!“, in which the famous little birds are main characters of a puzzle set in a top-down 3D world; however this is just a first step: the lines between game and real life have been blurred by the so-called “BirdCodes“, QR codes that can be found on the movie’s official merchandise and also in its credits. Scanning the codes, and only doing this, will be possible to activate some extra parts of the videogame.
Rovio announced the print of a billion codes distributed all over the world: they can be found on the official merchandise produced in collaboration with other big brands as McDonald’s, H&M, Pez and Lego. Once found the code, it will be possible to scan it with a mobile device and, through augmented reality, enjoy some exclusive content, unblocking new parts of the game. Every company will have a special branded mini-game and to play it will be necessary to scan the code every time: this is how Angry Birds will incentivize the users to physically visit the retail stores or buy the products to own the codes.
The campaign was possible thanks to the collaboration between Rovio and Zappar.