The impact of paper on daily life: #LookingForYou Campaign

Nowhere in your wildest IoT dreams did you consider the world connected to paper?

The Internet of Things (IoT), so we’re told, opens up all kinds of new opportunities.
It is forcing organisations of all kinds to rethink even the smallest product devices in the context of the newly emerging highly connected world we are racing towards.

Paper at the Heart of a Successful Campaign

Perhaps it’s time to think again. A marketing campaign for Battersea Dogs’ Home in London, the UK’s oldest dogs’ home, created by agency Ogilvy One UK has used digital paper at its heart.

And not only is connected paper a real thing (really!), it is also delivering fantastic results in this ground-breaking advertising campaign for Battersea Dogs’ Home.

Ogilvy One UK’s two-week #LookingForYou campaign for the charity seamlessly blends old-world physical marketing technique with the latest digital technologies to deliver an incredible customer experience and fantastic results which generated “10% more leads than Battersea has dogs”.

By embedding RFID chips in promotional printed leaflets, which were handed out to shoppers at London’s Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, East London, the advertising agency created a highly effective interactive campaign which resulted in a 33% spike in website visits to the Battersea Dogs’ Home website.

Former Battersea Resident Barley Follows Shoppers

Hidden Intellifi RFID sensors were located close to each of the multiple digital screens around the shopping centre. When someone with one of the leaflets passes close to a sensor, it triggers a video featuring one of Battersea dogs’ home’s former residents, an adorable dog called Barley.

Depending on the direction of approach, a different video is played, giving the sensation that Barley is following the person carrying the leaflet around the centre – no matter what route they take.

Once Barley has the leaflet carrier’s attention, the digital display shows the message “There’s a dog looking for you at Battersea” and a prompt to look again at the printed leaflet they are carrying. Thousands of people visited the Battersea dogs’ home website and twitter feed as a direct result of the campaign and 79% of the click-throughs from the campaign micro-site were new to Battersea.

Breaking the Borders between Print and Digital

The incredible response to the Ogilvy One UK campaign demonstrates how creative and successful campaigns are no longer “digital” or “traditional”.
For the greatest impact, marketing needs to creatively take the new opportunities digitalisation offers to leverage the impact of proven and tested traditional marketing techniques – and these paper-thin RFID chips embedded in traditional printed paper leaflets show how successful such an approach – which blurs the lines between digital and traditional – can be.