Brief:
- Eight O'Clock Coffee announced the Great Coffee Break, an augmented reality (AR) digital escape room people can play to win the grand prize — a year of free groceries (defined as an $8,000 check). The Great Coffee Break runs through August 11, and eight people will win the grand prize, according to a press release.
- Designed by Escape the Room, the entertainment company that creates live escape rooms in U.S. cities, the Great Coffee Break can be launched by scanning any Eight O'Clock Coffee package with the Shazam app or by going directly to GreatCoffeeBreak.com.
- Set in a fictitious animated roastery, the Great Coffee Break lets players solve coffee-themed puzzles in an effort to help bags of Eight O'Clock coffee "escape the roastery." Players can explore different virtual rooms within the roastery to find clues, solve puzzles and complete the mission.
Insight:
Eight O'Clock Coffee's sweepstakes gives customers a chance to interact with the brand while solving an online puzzle created by Escape the Room, which got its start by offering live entertainment to groups of people who had to work together to solve puzzles to get out of a real confined space. Escape rooms have proven popular with millennials and Gen Zers, and this virtual, AR-assisted version of the game lets Eight O'Clock tap into the trend without the steep cost or limited availability of in-person experiences.
By utilizing AR, Eight O'Clock is joining a raft of other brands in leveraging an increasingly popular marketing technology that's projected by Digi-Capital to hit $90 billion in the next five years. Similarly, restaurant chain Chili's this week introduced an AR game to engage fans during the FIFA World Cup, according to MediaPost.
Eight O'Clock's campaign comes as candy bar Snickers created a pop-up experience in New York City that challenged people to escape a similar room, dubbed the "Hunger Bunker." Snickers is introducing new "Intense" flavors — sweet and salty, fiery and espresso — for a limited time, and the escape room aimed to emphasize the urgency of the campaign.
