What’s so app-ealing about augmented reality?
If you watched Downton Abbey last Sunday (6th November), you may have noticed a slightly different kind of advert during the break. During a Waitrose commercial featuring Heston Blumenthal and Delia Smith, in environs similar to that of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School, viewers were asked to ‘pause and blipp’.
So what is blipping? If you have the Blippar app on your smartphone you can point your camera at anything that has digital content enabled to access information as a web link, video, coupon or augmented reality game. In this instance, viewers were given three options when they pointed their ‘magic lens’ at the TV screen during the pause: ‘Watch Delia’s cake decoration class’, ‘Be the first to see the (Waitrose) Christmas ad’ or ‘Download the Waitrose app’. It is the world’s first multichannel augmented reality campaign to merge both TV and press ads.
Early brand adopters of the technology include Tesco, Cadbury’s, Eurostar, Samsung and Heinz.
What happens when you point your lens and blipp your Oyster Travel card? You get live travel updates and a view of the London Underground map. Neat.