Yahoo x Maruko Chan AR
Campaign: Yahoo x Maruko Chan AR
Company: Verizon Media
Project Summary:
Yahoo Hong Kong has launched the AR augmented reality experience of "Chibi Maruko Chan" for the first time in Hong Kong. Yahoo rode on the IP partnership with Maruko Chan which is one of the famous Japanese anime in APAC, to develop a series of AR. This AR series is a new trial on daily and seasonal themes on weather reports and festivals to show good use of technology in untities and has longer run on content distribution. The popular and cute Maruko characters catch users’ eyeballs and induce their interest to try out the new tech and play with the ARs.
Background:
White Day AR: Users can use your mobile phone or tablet to search for the relevant key in Yahoo! Hong Kong search engine. The characters, the 3D Valentine's Day-shaped Maruko and Hanawa will be displayed on the screen in AR form. You can look at the Maruko surrounded by a sea of heart-shaped roses, or take a photo with the flower wheel holding heart-shaped chocolate. The pattern can be zoomed in and out at will, allowing you to take the picture at the best angle!
Daily Weather AR: The weather is unpredictable. If you want to be in a good mood all the time, you might try Yahoo’s latest weather AR in collaboration with Maruko. There are five Maruko ARs: sunny, cloudy, rainy, thunderstorm, and windy. Each model can be rotated 360 degrees, and Maruko will make corresponding expressions according to different scenes. For example, on a sunny day, Maruko holds an ice cream and enjoys sunbathing under the coconut trees and the sun; while in a thunderstorm AR, Maruko will hold the umbrella in the dark clouds and behave helplessly and sweating under the thunder and lightning. To play with the AR, users can open it on your phone, click on the top right to enable the camera, and then you can take pictures and videos with the cute Maruko!
Concepting and prototyping can be time-consuming and resource-intensive tasks. With AR, engineers can create digital overlays to see what features will look like next to objects in the real world. In view of this, we use the characters of Chibi Maruko to apply them to different backgrounds and scenes, such as White Day and weather forecasts, so that we can reduce design and development costs, and maximize the function and value of AR games.
Objective:
We hope to optimize the user experience in reading Yahoo content. As a media player, we not only strengthen the creativity and quality of the content, we also strengthen the use of technology, hoping to bring users a richer experience. AR’s relative seamlessness of digital objects within the “real world” encourages interactivity and engagement. We would like to encourage users to engage with the Yahoo brand by playing the AR games, as well as reinforcing Yahoo as the incubator of innovation and advertising technology.
On the other hand, we aim to enable the re-use and re-purpose of such multimedia content by proposing an innovative solution for its effective integration, AR game definitely is one of the effective formats. Consumer media habits are constantly evolving. So on, we hope that the next-gen content enables consumers to fulfil their expectations and behaviors.
Execution:
We promoted the AR series in 360 direction and integrated them with our daily content in a format of daily weather report and typhoon content hub. As the Maruko characters are cute to draw the attention of the youth, we promoted the AR intensively on social media and to viral out the heat for the new tech.
On content: Maruko Chan AR series land on Yahoo and present you the daily weather report: Chibi Maruko-chan (櫻桃小丸子) is bringing an AR weather report to Yahoo Morning News (Yahoo 早報) every day at 8am, with FIVE AR-enabled fun executions depicting the weather of the day: Rainy, Sunny, Cloudy, Typhoon and Thunderstorm.
Yahoo has launched a Typhoon content hub with Maruko AR to keep the users abreast of the latest weather and traffic conditions, as well as encouraging the users to play on the typhoon AR game.
On social media: Yahoo editors will based on the real time weather report to develop the real time social content, as well as an interesting way to present weather alerts, strengthen relevance and connectivity with users, and encourage users to experience the AR game together, creating the social viral. Besides, we also created different scenes and environments for this Maruko Chan AR game, such as Integrating with travel content, creating a series of Maruko Chan content curated to draw user attention, or taking the AR game to different scenic spots in Hong Kong.
