Students love their mobile phones (91% of first year undergraduates own a smartphone). And they love a deal. These truths set the foundation for a campaign that married the physical and digital worlds, through a brand new augmented reality experience.The problem: in the opening week of term, University students across the UK are bombarded with enticing, student-friendly deals.

The brief: to make Wetherspoon stand out from the competition and drive students through their doors.The Solution: Wetherspoon ConnectWe attracted our audience through intriguing messages on brightly-coloured symbols that achieved cut through as campus posters, on student websites, on beer mats and on stickers in the pubs themselves. The Wetherspoon Connect app, built around Aurasma’s cutting edge augmented reality platform, brought those symbols to life: turning physical printed material into on-screen animations and providing students with digital Beer, Spirit or Food vouchers to redeem at their local Wetherspoon bar. The more students engaged with the campaign, the more offers they could collect.The app worked another way too, allowing users to attach digital content to physical objects. So students could ‘tag’ videos and pictures of their Wetherspoon nights out by attaching them to pub fixtures and fittings. They used their usual social media channels - Facebook and Twitter – to tell their let their friends where to find the content and download the app. With the app installed, their friends could scan the objects and view the content for themselves. The campaign wasn’t confined to the pub though. Soon students realised they could attach content wherever they wanted: turning student towns into new social playgrounds and physical objects into new media channels. The result was a campaign that explored the commercial potential of Aurasma for the first time, introducing a completely new promotional mechanic and experience to the category.

In bar voucher redemption ran at an amazing 74%. Over 1.1 million impressions were achieved during first 6 weeks of the campaign.PR coverage and free brand exposure was valued as £212,000, significantly more than the cost of the entire campaign budget.Not only was the campaign a success in terms of driving footfall and redemption, it also enhanced the Wetherspoon brand as they became facilitators of a new social experience.