Pepsi cans become cinema screens in Blippar Turkey's campaign starring Cem Yilmaz

When it comes to marketing, the Turkish arm of global drinks giant Pepsi know how crucial mobile is within its media mix. Turkey has a ferociously high rate of mobile penetration – at the end of 2014, 93.9% of the population (71.9m people) had a mobile phone – and Pepsi frequently tap into this by sending fans mobile coupons to be redeemed on special offers.

But last year Pepsi Turkey decided to do something even more… exciting - something innovative that would enable them to continue rewarding fans with coupons while also boosting consumer engagement via mobile with a rich new layer of immersive interactivity. So first they joined forces with Turkey’s favourite comedy actor Cem Yilmaz. And then they gave Blippar a call.

Using Blippar’s powerful image-recognition and augmented reality technologies Pepsi Turkey turned 30 million drinks cans and tablemats (distributed throughout universities) into interactive cinema screens.

Fans used Blippar’s free visual browsing app (downloaded on smartphones and tablets) to unlock an animated Wheel of Fortune game and the chance to win brilliant prizes, including tickets to see Cem Yilmaz’s new movie Pek Yakinda before is cinematic release, tickets to the film's Turkish premiere, movie merchandise, mobile bundles and more. Fans could also play a second, 'brick-breaker' mobile game.

Pepsi Turkey’s Blippar campaign scored outstanding engagement results: over 132,000 unique users blipped cans and tablemats more than 460,000 times during the four-month campaign; generating a huge conversion rate of 1.5% (where Blippar's average conversion rate for cans with an on-pack call-to-action is 1%).

Pepsi achieved this significant conversion through a highly effective three-step call-to-action (CTA) that was added to 30 million blippable cans, perfectly educating consumers about how to use the Blippar app. The illustrated CTA teaches consumers to first download the free Blippar app onto their mobile device; then open it up, then blipp the Pepsi can by filling their mobile screen with the image on its front.

Each person lingered inside the blipp to check out its exclusive content and features for an average of 74 seconds, with over three quarters of them doing so more than once. This high total dwell time delivers the same brand engagement for Pepsi as 1.1 million people watching a 30-second television advertisement.

The gaming content on offer was sensational, and 37% of all taps within the blipp were to play the brick-breaker game. The competition offered in mid-October was also hugely popular: on the two days Pepsi distributed competition codes, the number of interactions shot up by more than 10x. These two statistics prove how powerful content is as a key driver of active engagement in a Blippar campaign - with games and competitions scoring extremely high in the blipp content popularity chart. They also highlight how effective Blippar is at tracking intricate campaign metrics.

During the four-month campaign, Pepsi sales shot up by 20%, helping them achieve their highest market share of the decade.

Pepsi Turkey's innovative, interactive packaging project create huge buzz around Cem Yilmaz's film Pek Yakinda, and has also been one of Turkey’s most successful mobile engagement campaigns ever - as well as a big step in mobile marketing for the country’s fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands.

Zehra Oney, Blippar Turkey CEO, said: ‘Pepsi wanted to boost engagement with its young target market, and used Blippar to do this. The results were better then expected; after just four months 132,000 unique users had blipped Pepsi cans and mats 460,000 times all over Turkey.

'Moreover, by making cans interactive through Blippar, Pepsi could track who was engaging with their marketing campaign, where, when, and for how long. The message to the marketing world is clear: using Blippar your products become your most effective media channels – they become your new domain names.’