In July, leading celebrity magazine heat released their first ever augmented reality issue. Following an exceptional amount of interest from readers, the Bauer media-owned publication now intends to continue using the Aurasma platform for future issues.
Through the ‘heat extra’ mobile application powered by Aurasma, the publication’s editorial team and their agency Engine Creative created 13 interactive pages, each of which hosted multiple interactive videos featuring stars including David Walliams and Katy Perry.
The unique and engaging augmented reality content used within the issue generated over 180,000 interactions in just four days – a significant figure given the magazine’s total circulation of 290,003. Click through rates varied from 7 per cent to up to 42 per cent for a feature that allowed readers to link directly to heat’s Spotify playlist.
The clear calls to action in the magazine, exclusive celebrity content, treasure hunt style competitions and a smartphone-savvy readership combined to make this one of the most effective uses of the Aurasma platform in publishing to date.
These results coupled with the overwhelming amount of positive feedback from readers is the reason that Bauer Media has decided to continue creating augmented reality issues in the future using the Aurasma publishing platform.
Nicky Holt, Publisher of heat magazine, commented: “We were delighted to see that our readers found the augmented reality content as interesting and engaging as we did. Operating in such a competitive environment, we always strive to be a multi-platform brand, allowing our readers to access their celebrity news through as many media channels as possible. Aurasma’s platform allows us to take one step closer to achieving this goal by merging the boundaries of our print, online, mobile and broadcast offerings.”
Matt Mills, Head of Sales at Aurasma said: “We are delighted the heat team have decided to continue using the Aurasma platform for future issues of the magazine. Working closely with their design agency, Engine Creative, the heat editorial team produced amazing creative that had readers reaching for their mobile phones in droves. Coupled with a well thought out user journey and effective communication of the new features to readers, this is a case study on how to implement Aurasma.”
Creative Director of Engine Creative, Phil Christer, adds: “Augmented reality is such an exciting area at the moment and consumers are quickly tagging on to the idea that their favourite print magazines can offer them additional interactive features. The cloud-based Aurasma platform is the easiest, quickest and most intuitive way to publish augmented content. Our clients, including magazines such as heat, are seeing real business benefits from implementing this new technology and we look forward to working on many more projects like this in the future.”
About Aurasma
Aurasma says: “Aurasma is the world’s leading augmented reality platform. Available as a free app for iPhones, iPads and high-powered Android devices or as a free kernel for developers, Aurasma uses advanced image and pattern recognition to blend the real-world with rich interactive content such as videos and animations called “Auras”.
Auras can be created for printed images, product packaging, clothing, physical places and users can even use the app to create and share their own. Since its launch in June 2011, Aurasma has had more than four million downloads, 400 Aurasma-enabled apps and over 8,000 partners in markets including retail, fashion, sport, automotive, education, advertising and publishing are using the free technology in their campaigns, on their products or embedding the technology in their own applications. Aurasma was developed by and is part of software company Autonomy – an HP Company.”
