I was reading an interesting Case Study about How Nike Used Interactive Video to Draw Crowds at Sporting Events recently realized that it’s Perfect for so many companies – including my own.
We’ve (Directi) sponsored tons of events (industry gatherings, sales expos, recruitment focused conferences, etc.) in the past and have had a booth in most of them. Over the years, we’ve used several carrots to bring people to our booth – whether it’s the classic “Drop in your Visiting Card for a Surprise Gift” or simply having a big bowl of awesome candy (hey, it Works) or giving away freebies like Pen Drives and T-Shirts (surprisingly popular still) to organizing Casino Nights (passes to be collected at the booth), coding contents and Treasure Hunts.
Now I’m not saying that these don’t work. Au contraire, we’ve had looong queues for our T-shirts on multiple occasions (with people coming back and asking for multiple T-shirts), we almost always run out of candy and have even had plenty of buzz for the Casino Night. But it’s really time to think out of the box – and this is really something that can work.
Why? Because Augmented Reality (a combination of live video and interactive graphics) is still something few people have been exposed to. It quite literally takes pretty much the same ideas (freebies, treasure hunts, etc.) and changes the delivery/execution – which makes all the difference.
And it does works. The Nike 6.0 case study proves it. Add to that this which someone posted to everyone in office, and everyone in office Had to try it at least once.
All you need is:
- A creative concept to use Augmented Reality: You could do something elaborate like virtual clues or map for a treasure hunt or something as simple as Nike’s virtual slot machine works.
- The Augmented Reality itself: Nike used Total Immersion and I assume there’s a growing number of companies that do this.
- Basic infrastructure: A few webcams and large screen displays and distributable print outs of the basic images to enable to video experience.
Check out the pictures of how Nike set it up. You’ll need to find a way to get the initial few people to your booth. Post that, word of mouth will ensure that more people will follow.
Given that we have a whole bunch of events coming up in 2010, I’m really hoping to test this out first-hand.
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