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Using any new technology bares pitfalls. I understand the appeal of new technology. However, before investing in time and effort one must first invest time and money into making sure that a technology adds real value to a client.

So how do you do the former without first doing the latter?

Monster Hunt is Gencia's first Augmented Reality Campaign. They have already run successful mobile campaigns for government and local authorities and know what makes a campaign successful... "user involvement".

By running mobile marketing campaigns for the police, schools and local government, it would be easy to assume that making the leap to AR was a decision taken lightly and with much haste. But the reality (no pun intended) was very different indeed.

Before Monster Hunt in Manchester kicked off the meeting room was full of ideas. But one must resist the appeal of new technology if it does not add value. The questions one must ask is the following...

What are the barriers to entry?

Why did Gencia chose to develop Monster Hunt on the Layar Platform? The main issue was adoption rate and cost. Layar has a very strong, stable and growing community and platform. It comes pre installed on many Smartphone's or it's free to download via the iPhone and Android market place.

Second, it's familiar, with an easy-to-use interface that many users already know their way around.

So in a nutshell that's why we decide to start with Layar for our Monster Hunt campaign in Manchester. However using Layar brings me onto one last point...

Accessibility and Adoption

Could we create a Augmented Reality campaign that reaches everyone? Gencia knows how to make a campaign more appealing, but if no one plays then we have failed no matter how much people are talking about it. Other than being cool, will a technology help in some way? To answer this we had to look at AR from a different perceptive. The users who will play using Layar and the users who won't.

It was never going to be a successful campaign if we just did AR. We don't have rose tinted glasses on here, it's about money, right? We needed as many users to play the Monster Hunt Game as possible. To do this, one must never limit campaigns to just using 'new' for the sake of it. There is nothing wrong with the old. Monster Hunt was adapted to work with both current online games and AR. We allow users to collect Monsters in a various ways, such as playing online, using their mobile, recommending friends or even scanning QR codes found around town.

This gave Monster Hunt a bigger appeal while we also reinforcing AR and may have even helped the AR market grow in Manchester.

Bold claims "Helping the market grow". So how did we do that? Well, we needed Augmented Reality to be a Campaign Tool not a gimmick! Adoption rates were and are very important. We needed to help users understand AR and how to use it.

To help this we ran 2 event days and there are more planned, where we actively show users how to play on their mobile phone. We also released videos and placed QR codes to jump start their experience. Taking 5 minutes to show one person may not sound very productive, but never underestimate the power of word of mouth or that of screaming girls (the monsters before you get any ideas!).

So these were the starting blocks of Gencia's first AR campaign for the Manchester area. So far, it's been very successfully with thousands playing both online and in AR. Press and support has been very good, and although the campaign was mainly targeted in Manchester, we have seen users from all over the UK getting involved in the Hunt.

So finally, can Augmented Reality be used as a campaign tool? Yes! We have the proof. But one must also embrace the old as well as the new. The Campaign ends just after Halloween and, so far, analysing our results show AR has been a great addition to our toolkit. Over half of our players did so using their mobiles, Android being the most popular device so far.

If you have not seen Layar you can download my example Layar CFC . Adobe also has some cools AR examples around using a openscorce toolkit ARToolKit and Flash. You will see more to come from Gencia using this in the coming months.

Checkout Monster Hunt