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Immersive marketing continues to be an opportune, yet still challenged, segment. Sitting at the intersection of brand marketing and spatial computing, it includes things like sponsored AR lenses that let consumers interact and engage with brands, or virtually try on products.
Driving immersive marketing are a few key elements. Lens creation software arms brands and developers with low-code tools to author AR experiences. Meanwhile, networks like Snapchat and TikTok likewise offer the ability to amplify lenses throughout their social graphs.
There’s also a real business case, which can be seen in the performance metrics around AR campaigns. And though the future of AR is headworn, we’re mostly talking about AR marketing on smartphones. That’s where the scale lies… and brand marketers are all about scale.
This is the topic of a recent report from our research arm, ARtillery Intelligence, including ecosystem analysis and case studies from real AR marketing campaigns. The report joins our excerpt series, continuing in this edition with a look at Chips Ahoy’s Immersive ad campaign.
Sweet & Spatial
To promote its 60th birthday, Chips Ahoy launched a new Confetti Cake Cookie. To sustain its status as an iconic brand, it wanted to promote itself and the new cookie to Gen Z. Though a strong brand, Chips Ahoy’s visibility is greater among older audiences who grew up with it.
To meet these goals and align with its underlying brand ethos to help customers ”find their happy place,” it was interested in an immersive format with lighthearted vibes and the ability to invite users to participate in the birthday fun. So deciding to launch an AR experience on TikTok.
To meet these goals, Chips Ahoy created a Branded Effect with creative agency, Ignite XR. The Effect offered a mini-game that let users catch cookies on a plate, which they could move horizontally to align with the falling treats. This applied casual-game best practices.
For example, the game mechanics let users control the plate’s movement by shifting their heads in the corresponding horizontal directions. This was not only an intuitive input mechanism, but it achieved the participatory goals noted above by letting users themselves be the game controller.
To amplify the lens to bigger audiences – particularly the Gen Z target audience noted earlier – TikTok worked with five generationally-relevant influencers. These individuals showcased the AR experience to their followers to accelerate its traction and naturally-viral potential.
To further boost engagement, Chips Ahoy leaned into TikTok’s Superlike interactive add-on for its branded effect campaigns. And it utilized TikTok’s TopView ad option for additional visibility for the AR experience. The latter is one of many upsells in TikTok’s Branded Effects toolkit.
On Brand
So what were the results? All the above drove a 10.1 percent higher click-through rate than benchmarks. It also achieved a 9.2 percent higher engagement than benchmarks, 34 million video views, and 1,436+ video creations. The latter involves users recording their sessions.
As for strategic takeaways, this AR campaign’s success flowed from a few best practices. First was its on-brand experience – carrying a fun factor that aligned with Chips Ahoy’s persona. This is always an important and intangible factor in AR marketing so that the experience feels natural.
Second, it tapped into gamification. This not only bred a sense of competition among peers, but it added virality as users wanted to boast their scores. An additional level of virality flowed from the goofy and self-deprecating vibes of users who danced around the screen to play the game.
Controlling the game with one’s head also made it more engaging and participatory. This is a strong AR tactic to let the user not only play but be the game controller, as noted. Gestural or facial activation-events should always be considered in the immersive marketing playbook.
We’ll pause there and circle back in the next installment of this series with another campaign case study. Meanwhile, check out the full report.
Header image credit: Fernanda Martinez on Unsplash