Charm Hunters
To celebrate the nostalgia and fantasy elements of the brand we created an interactive augmented reality quest that happened over three days at FanExpo in Toronto.
We redesigned Lucky’s 8 charms into their 8-bit counterparts and leaned heavily on nostalgic video game elements, in a modern way, to create our look and feel. Various elements that promoted the Charm Hunter campaign (program books mailed out to attendees in advance, a splash page on the FanExpo website, banner ads) let attendees know they could become Charm Hunters and discover IRL (In Real Life) Power Ups to power up their FanExpo experience.
On arrival FanExpo attendees were handed cards with AR triggers that looked like treasure chests. They were then told to seek out the Charm Keeper, hold up the chest to the magic mirror and all will be revealed. On holding the chest up to the mirror (a screen with an outward facing camera) their chest came to life playing an animation that either revealed a power up or an empty chest. All prizes won corresponded to one of Lucky’s eight charms. Find a power up like the heart charm and win a meet and greet with a celebrity of your choice, find a shooting star charm and jump to the front of any line, etc..
Our booth housed the Charm Keeper and his magic mirrors. NPCs (Non Player Characters) wandered around the convention handing out the chests. Speech bubbles above their heads let you know to speak to them. They had two scripted lines, and initial and an extra if you asked any questions. Ask a third question and they’d go back to their original line (all small details from classic RPG video games). Attendees were super engaged and willing to wait up to 10 minutes to scan their chests in search of a power up.
Many winners redeemed their power ups throughout the convention (like a heart charm used by YJ Wei to meet Nathan Fillion), and we covered it all live via FanExpo’s social media channels to thousands of fans.
We discovered that Lucky Charms ads had run in comics for decades. We wanted to acknowledge that and created special limited edition sample sized boxes to hand out to charm hunters after scanning their chests (so no one went away empty handed) letting them know know we’ve been into comics since 1964.
Excerpt from the Torontoist by Christopher Bird:
Not all of the non-traditionally nerdy booths were so disliked, however. The Canada Post booth got respectable traffic because of some new, Superman-themed stamps. Sick Kids Hospital was on hand because it was promoting the Extra Life gaming marathon for charity, and staff said the response had been enthusiastic (and that they loved answering the question “why are you here, exactly?”). Nerds don’t demand that you be a nerd product. But they do want there to be some relevance. And they’ll line up for anything that respects their interests as nerds, hence the success of a clever Lucky Charms interactive ad experience, where you brought a cardboard “chest” to a scanner (given to you by a living RPG character, of course) and you had the opportunity to win something. Granted, most of the time you just won a miniature box of Lucky Charms (and more than a few people at the convention were more or less living off of miniature boxes of Lucky Charms).
https://torontoist.com/2013/08/a-2013-fan-expo-post-mortem/