‘Adventure into Design’ with Billy Blue AR
Client
Capabilities
Date
06/09/2021
Inspiring school leavers to envisage their future by enabling them to venture inside the various worlds of design through Augmented Reality.
The Challenge
With an ambitious enrolment target across 2020/2021 and their mass lead-driving activities not possible due to COVID, Billy Blue College of Design needed to reimagine how they could connect with prospective students.
Billy Blue challenged VCCP with creating a new and exciting experience to capture the attention of prospective students. The last thing students want is a wordy 150 page course guide. They have a ‘show me don’t tell me’ mentality so it was critical to create an experience that could visually engage in an instant.
AR is an incredibly exciting space to play in, it offers an immersive and emotive experience that leaves a visual imprint on users minds Beth Duddy, VCCP’s CX Director
Our Approach
We worked closely with our sister agency SomeOne and Augmented Reality (AR) experts Unbnd, using a Design Thinking approach.
Through insight and ideation workshops with prospective students, we found the best way to engage young people was to show them what might be in store for them if they study at Billy Blue. Students are inspired by ‘people like me', so showing work produced by students with similar passions or backgrounds creates excitement around what their future selves could create.
Check out the video below for more details on the approach...
Enter 'Adventure into design' in AR
Stepping away from the traditional course guide, we created an industry first, allowing students to explore the wonderful ‘worlds of design’ in WebAR.
In the experience there are 5 worlds, each visualising a landscape inspired by a different discipline. Featuring work either created or inspired by students past or present. Students are encourage to tap on the student works to unlock the story of who produced it, and take steps to follow a similar path.
A WebAR experience
The experience was open to everyone as it was launched through Zappar WebAR (no need to download a pesky app) users can simply scan the now familiar QR code to launch and play on their phones.
Promoting the experience
An accompanying microsite was developed to; launch the experience, provide more detail about students’ work and give the chance to peek behind the scenes to see how the experience was created.
The experience was promoted with an incredibly eye catching out of home campaign and TikTok activation created by SomeOne and Unbnd.
Loved this WebAR experience. It’s one of those experiences that just feels effortless but you know takes an awful lot of skill, craft and care to deliver Caspar Thykier, Co-Founder at Zappar
Results
The experience exceeded expectations with over 30,000 activations, contributing to 20% year on year growth in domestic enrolments and 109% above enrolment targets. We are currently working on phase two of Billy Blue AR, launching at the end of 2021...watch this space.
Launch the experience yourself here and explore the possibilities of design
Advertising, Customer Experience, Digital, Experiential
Project for Torrens University Australia
