When Treasury Wine Estates released 19 Crimes Snoop Cali Red this summer, named for its new partner in wine, rapper Snoop Dogg, it already came with the brand’s signature AR-enhanced label.
Now, with an assist from creative studio Tactic and the web-based AR platform from 8th Wall, Snoop Cali Red has a new (and, arguably, more impressive) AR experience featuring the dee-oh-double-gee.
Like other products from Treasury Wine Estates, such as The Walking Dead and Brazen, the likeness of Snoop comes alive when scanned with the Living Wine Labels app for iOS and Android, with animation overlaid on the label through your smartphone’s camera view.
The latest AR magic trick, titled “Ask the Doggfather,” is accessed through its corresponding mobile website. As with the app, scanning the label through your mobile browser unlocks the experience, which starts with a voice-activated prompt to ask Snoop a question. In response, a virtual version of Snoop materializes in front of the bottle and answers the query, Magic 8-Ball-style.
“Our app-based Snoop Cali Red AR experience performed beyond our wildest dreams, so this time we re-engaged with the 19 Crimes team with the ambition to hit an even wider audience,” said Peter Oberdorfer, president of Tactic, in a statement. “At the same time, we were already blown away by what we were seeing from 8th Wall’s technology. In a way, this was the perfect use case — we knew that both 19 Crimes and Snoop Cali Red had huge augmented reality audiences from the native app, so what better venue to launch to an even wider audience? Alongside the team at Cashmere, we came up with an experience that emulates a Magic 8-Ball, allowing a hologram of Snoop Dogg to respond to a host of questions.”
The experience is made possible by the new Curved Image Targets functionality in 8th Wall’s WebAR platform. While typical image recognition technology (like 8th Wall’s own Image Targets) is designed for flat targets, 8th Wall’s innovation is ideally-suited for bottles, cans, and other convex packaging.
“We are delighted that Tactic is the first to use our Curved Image Target technology for a consumer-facing experience,” said Erik Murphy-Chutorian, founder and CEO of 8th Wall. “With WebAR, users are now able to activate wine bottle AR experiences with just the tap of a link.”
With the Curved Image Target tech and the reach of web-based AR versus dedicated native apps, 8th Wall is poised to capitalize as beverage brands from Coca-Cola and Body Armor to Jack Daniels and Patrón Tequila increasingly adopt AR marketing for their products.
Meanwhile, Snoop Dogg, with other AR appearances through Marvel and Snapchat, is well on his way to being the Doggfather of AR.