St. Louis Blues Case Study
How St. Louis’s Hockey Team Turned AR in to ROI
$34,922.10
in revenue
192
ticket purchases from the scavenger hunt
26X
return on ad spend
395
players visited every sponsor's business
The St. Louis Blues Hockey Team wanted to develop an activation in anticipation of the 2018-2019 season that would not only get fans energized and spur ticket sales, but would also position the Blues as an innovative and technologically advanced organization.
We had recently been invited by Facebook to their annual F8 Developers Conference where Facebook gives insight in to whats on the horizon with the platform and what new products they’re offering. The product that captured our attention was their rollout of a new AR creators studio, which allows users to create their own augmented reality effects directly on the platform.
When the Blues mentioned to us that they wanted to do something new and exciting with emerging technology for a pre-season activation, we wanted to find a way to utilize Facebook’s new AR offering. After much internal discussion, we settled on a city-wide scavenger (or ScavengAR hunt, as we would later name it) in which fans would receive various incentivizations to trigger AR effects through their Facebook camera.
First, we built ten individual AR effects within Facebook’s AR studio. Each effect was linked to a respective trigger image, which was printed on a 10’X2’ banner. We partnered with ten well-known businesses around the Blues home city of St. Louis and installed banners on location at each business.
We then created a microsite that users would register for through Facebook. Once registered, these users would be prompted with ten different Blues-related trivia questions. When each question was correctly answered, users would be given a riddle that provided a clue as to the location with one of the banners. We attached GPS locations for each banner that would let users know how many miles or feet away they were from each respective banner.
Users would be notified through the microsite once they were within 100ft of a banner. After locating the banner, the user would tap a button on the microsite to activate their Facebook camera. Facebook would then trigger an augmented reality effect and would give the user credit for locating the respective banner. Users would receive prizes along the way for capturing 1, 3, 5, and 7 banners (pucks, apparel, single-game tickets). Once users located all 10 banners, they would be entered in to a drawing for a pair of season tickets.
Users were given two weeks to complete the hunt. We increased awareness by having our PR team secure television and editorial coverage on the day of the launch, as well as running paid Facebook ads urging users to sign up. The content of the Facebook ads were a combination of static images, and videos of Blues players triggering the AR effects and telling users how to register for the ScavengAR hunt.