Mazda, Metro Herald and Mindshare team up for augmented reality competition

Augmented reality is playing a central part in a new Metro Herald competition that is giving away a new Mazda2 as its top prize.

Since last Tuesday, Metro Herald has been running a teaser campaign encouraging readers to download a dedicated augmented reality app called Junaio on their Android smartphones or iPhones.

From today, readers can hold their smartphones over the ads in a special Mazda takeover edition of the paper, to watch a selection of Mazda videos come to life in a bespoke, 3D augmented reality microsite.

They can then visit the Mazda Ireland Facebook page to answer a simple question, based on the video, to enter the draw to win a new Mazda2 worth €15,000. The ‘Defy Convention’ competition runs until 25 May.

According to Mazda, its business objective was to show consumers real story videos about how the company has borrowed from Japanese history and culture to think differently, achieve excellence and to ‘Challenge Convention To Make Things Better’ to build better cars.  Augmented reality was seen as a new and innovative advertising solution to help achieve this key business need for Mazda.

“We are very excited about this inventive campaign,” said Richard Molloy, marketing manager, Mazda Ireland. “The print promotion comes alive with the use of augmented reality and ensures we can integrate this promotion across print, online, mobile, and social media channels for maximum engagement.”

Richie Kelly, commercial manager for Metro Herald said his newspaper is constantly looking at ways to bridge the gap between print and digital through smartphone technology.

“We’ve been aware of augmented reality for a while so when Mazda and Mindshare challenged us to create a campaign to ‘Defy Convention’ we knew it was the perfect solution. All three parties have worked hard to achieve the objective of creating a high-impact and innovative campaign, that complimented the quality of the Mazda assets and enabled the competition to be top of mind amongst readers.

“The in-paper creative executions used within the ownership, linked to a strong social media presence, have acted as the perfect springboard to launch augmented reality. For us the ability to bring a print ad to life through augmented reality offers both an added level of interaction for consumers and increased measurability for advertisers.”

Mindshare worked on the media planning and campaign development.

Junaio is an existing augmented reality app that acts as the interaction point between the print ads and the user. Metro Herald sourced developers who designed and built the 3D AR microsite that was built specifically for the this campaign.

Click here to see the Metro Herald augmented reality edition.