Toy manufacturer Mattel is turning to Layar’s Augmented Reality technology to promote one of the world’s most iconic and famous toys: Barbie®.

During the busy holiday shopping season, Mattel partnered with Toys“R”Us Canada, one of the world’s largest toy stores, to promote Barbie®. The promotion objective is to engage with young girls and parents at home, in-store and online and runs in store into Summer 2015.

Brandfire Marketing Group was engaged by Mattel with the challenge to bring Barbie® to life throughout the consumer purchase journey. Working with Blippar’s Nigel Newton, Vice President for Canada, Brandfire was able to create an omni-channel campaign that brought consumers in-store and engaged with them at shelf level by inviting them to participate in secret savings. AR content was also featured in select email blasts as well as additional custom-created entertainment content. All of these elements ended with access to a free downloadable Barbie™ Diary with integrated AR content.

The Barbie™ Diary includes several interactive AR elements as well as a savings coupon for all Barbie® purchases in-store at Toys“R”Us Canada. Scanning the coloring pages with the Layar App reveals inspiration for how to complete the drawing, while games and puzzles have their answers revealed through Augmented Reality.

“At Mattel, we are constantly challenging ourselves to innovate at retail and bring our brands to life in-store for the customer. Layar provided a great platform for consumers to interact and engage with our brand directly at shelf in an exciting new way,” said Lu Huang, Sr. Marketing Associate, Barbie®. “We kicked off with a few smaller executions to test out the technology, which was new to us, but we are excited about the endless possibilities. Imagine being able to “meet” a life-size talking and moving Barbie® character at your local Toys“R”Us store – how cool would that be? I’m sure we’re not far away!”

Mattel and Toys“R”Us Canada have also produced both in-store displays as well as direct mail flyers for the campaign. Nearly six million copies of the Toys“R”Us Canada Holiday Toy Book featuring 10 interactive AR pages were distributed to homes and store locations across Canada. Scanning the pages with Layar App provided a direct link to shop for Barbie® online.

This combined promotion from Mattel and Toys“R”Us is a great example of how Augmented Reality and Interactive Print can be used to engage audiences in a wide variety of complementary ways.