Glenmorangie, a popular Scotch whiskey brand, sponsored Kolga Tbilisi – Institution of Photography for their exhibitions. As part of this collaboration, they aimed to create an engaging Instagram filter to challenge their target audience. Their main target audience consisted of people aged 18-40 from Georgia and Kazakhstan. Glenmorangie’s objectives were to increase audience engagement, drive user generated content and loyalty.
Concept idea behind the compelling AR campaign:
The brand approached PlayMakers, which is a partner marketing agency of Crosscreators, to help with the concept of creating an Instagram filter. They came up with an idea to create a filter that would count colors to underline the main concept of the exhibition which Glenmorangie sponsored. The campaign was to reward three users who captured the most colorful shot. Instagram was chosen as the platform due to its extensive reach and accessibility for the target audience.
“Never been done before” experience created in a week:
Color-counting filters had not been previously developed for any social media platform. Finding a creator with the necessary technical experience proved challenging, but the client was fortunate to collaborate with Denis Rossiev (enuriru), one of the top-tier creators on Crosscreators who experimented with different methods until finding a way to make the filter count colors accurately. He made the main part of the filter (detecting colors) work in 5 days – he just added some visual elements like frame and logo later. In general, the filter was finished in a week.
Given the vast number of color shades available, selecting an absolute color number, such as 100 or 2354, was impractical for an Instagram filter. Therefore, we had to limit the number of colors used. Considering the visual appearance within the frame, a four-digit number, 9999 colors, was deemed visually optimal.
Integrating the brand logo into the experience posed a challenge, as it could potentially detract from social media shares and impressions. To address this, Denis and the PlayMakers team decided to incorporate the brand logo discreetly within the frame, ensuring it did not disrupt the user experience.
Initially, we considered using an animated frame that would form once the recording started. However, as the main concept revolved around capturing a single shot with the maximum number of colors, we opted for a static frame.
The color-detection mechanism is highly sensitive and starts calculating colors as soon as the filter is activated, continuing to do so while recording. This real-time process ensures accurate color detection. Although the filter had a highly saturated visual appearance, it still detected real-life colors.
How Glenmorangie’s AR campaign caught attention of international magazines:
The filter was published on three different Instagram pages related to the photography exhibition hosted by Kolga Tbilisi. Promotion efforts spanned across their social media channels and garnered attention from international magazines. The campaign’s idea was described to the audience, facilitating easy engagement.
Increased UGC without advertising the filter:
The brand has not used any kind of advertising on the AR campaign- they only shared it as posts and stories to different Instagram and Facebook accounts. The filter was active for two weeks on the three Instagram pages, resulting in a total of 30k opens, 6.1k captures, 1386 shares, and 108,323 impressions.
Setting the stage for the future:
The success of this Glenmorangie campaign once again highlights the efficacy of incorporating AR in marketing strategies. The use of augmented reality resulted in increased user engagement, heightened brand awareness, and the creation of user-generated content. We are proud to have been part of this innovative experience, which will undoubtedly bring about significant changes in the realm of augmented reality creation.
