Celebrating 130 years Club Brugge with an interactive AR experience

Challenge

In order to ade­quate­ly link 130 excit­ing years of Club Brugge his­to­ry with the his­to­ry of Bruges, the goal was to cre­ate an inter­ac­tive out-of-home city mar­ket­ing campaign. 

Its aim was to con­nect such a cam­paign to a gen­uine­ly unique fan expe­ri­ence, tar­get­ed beyond their usu­al audi­ence to include both tourists and Club Brugge sup­port­ers who live else­where as a way to grow Club Brugge brand aware­ness and con­nec­tion. The cam­paign was active from Octo­ber 30^th, 2021 until Jan­u­ary 30^th, 2022.

Concept

We AR Bruges is an interactive walking tour with a combination of a digital experience featuring 7 interactive missions, a physical point of sale (The Club City Shop), and OOH displays (printed banners near important monuments across Bruges’ city centre).

These Out-Of-Home banners are persistent triggers to an interactive web experience that you perform, either individually or in a group, in a significant public space. This is a win-win-win scenario:

• Tourists familiarise themselves with the Club brand,
• the city attracts new visitors in existing Club fans,
• and Club is able to generate new qualified leads.

A primary goal of this campaign is to boost foot traffic to the pop-up Club Brugge City Shop in Bruges’ main high street, which is the final mission and destination of the walking tour.

Experience

We AR Bruges is an AR web appli­ca­tion that fea­tures 7 pro­gres­sive mis­sions as you explore a 1,891 kilometre walk­ing jour­ney in Bruges, with a free gift (enam­el pin & stick­ers) in the City Shop as a prize. At each loca­tion, scan the QR code and see if you’ve got what it takes to sprint along­side Noa Lang or score a goal against Simon Mignolet. 

As Club Brugge’s offi­cial sup­pli­er and dig­i­tal part­ner, Bits of Love designed and devel­oped the mobile plat­form, coor­di­nat­ed between all par­ties, and inte­grat­ed these tech­nolo­gies into a per­form­ing mobile-first web experience.

Process

Exe­cut­ing a com­plex and ambi­tious project with­in the per­for­mance con­straints of a mobile web appli­ca­tion pre­sent­ed itself with its fair share of cre­ative and tech­ni­cal challenges.

The immersive media agency Yon­dr was faced with com­ing up with cre­ative and interactive AR concepts that are doable within a limited web system, and sub­se­quent­ly opti­mis­ing these con­cepts for all sorts of mobile devices. 

The dif­fi­cul­ties Bits of Love faced came from ideat­ing a strong design, imple­ment­ing mul­ti­lin­gual sup­port, cre­at­ing the over­ar­ch­ing plat­form that works well on all sorts of mobile devices, and keep­ing pri­va­cy con­cerns in mind whilst keep­ing track of mis­sion progress over the course of mul­ti­ple days with­in a mobile browser.

Result: mission completed!

Through­out the cam­paign, the web­site gar­nered 166k views with an aver­age engage­ment rate of 92.76%. These engaged Club fans com­plet­ed 9.239 mis­sions over 6.696 ses­sions, account­ing for 35.000 esti­mat­ed par­tic­i­pants over­all. The cam­paign result­ed in 3.472 qual­i­fied leads.

Anec­do­tal­ly, Club fans real­ly enjoyed the expe­ri­ence over­all as a new way to dis­cov­er Bruges and we received favourable reviews from sup­port­ers who praised the unique concept. One of those groups reviewed their experience like this:

• Score: ⁹⁄₁₀
• Number of participants: 4
• Favourite experience: ​“The bear and his scarf”

Conclusion

The We AR Bruges cam­paign takes inter­ac­tive city mar­ket­ing to the next lev­el and high­lights Club Brugge’s efforts as a Bel­gian dig­i­tal sports pioneer.