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Beer brand lets you send digital ‘message in a bottle’

Marketing firms still can’t resist working the occasional QR code into their campaigns, even if most smartphone users never bother scanning them.

A new publicity drive by Argentine beer brand Andes, however, could well see boozers firing up their scanning app, though what greets them may not always be to their liking.

Working with creative agency Del Campo Saatchi & Saatchi, Andes has come up with an entertaining QR code video trick it’s calling ‘message in a bottle.’

Here’s how it works: First, you buy a bottle of Andes beer sporting the QR code. Then you download the relevant app and record a video message, assigning it to the bottle you’ve just bought.

You then gift the bottle to a someone you know and, depending on the nature of the message, either 1-wait around to see their delighted reaction, or 2-leg it away from the scene as fast as your legs can carry you.

The videos stay in the cloud and disappear Snapchat-style once they’ve been viewed.

Andes’ novel publicity campaign comes with a couple of amusing ads, posted above and below.

This isn’t the first offbeat beer-based marketing stunt launched by the South American firm. A few years back it unveiled the Teletransporter, a special soundproof booth installed in bars that let guys pretend they were somewhere else (a hospital, for example), if their partner called – that campaign won an award. And then there was the bizarre Andes Friend Recovery campaign centering on a kind of freaky robot machine with teleconferencing functionality designed “so that you can be with your girlfriend somewhere and with your friends at the bar at the same time.”

[Source: Marketing Land]

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
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