Chocapic, the chocolate cereal from Nestlé, is promoting its sponsorship of the new movie “Arthur and the revenge of Maltazard” with an Augmented Reality application that turns the cereal package into a game console. The online portion of the campaign, recently featured on the Creative Zone, has a teaser game that can be played with or without a webcam.

A great post was written originally on Jawbone.TV about the Chocapic Augmented Reality campaign and we would like to thank its author, Todd Denis, for letting us re-post the blog for our readers. Enjoy.

At first glance, the cereal box game for Nestle’s Chocapic (promoting ‘Arthur the Revenge of Maltazard’) seems to be yet another ill-conceived augmented reality (AR) marketing experiment (see ‘40 Augmented Reality Projects Sure To Blow Your Mind … Or Just Blow’). However, when you look at the fundamental interactivity at play, it’s not difficult to see the real possibilities of AR as a legitimate story, game and entertainment tool.

In this case, we’re dealing with what equates to a stand-alone hand-held maze game. Doesn’t get much simpler than that, but the impact on engagement is huge. Comparative to the cool yet fleeting ‘display and rotate’ variety of most AR (see GE Smart Grid or Star Trek Enterprise), the Chocapic game has more in common with outstanding AR spatial memory game levelHead.

But, whereas levelHead is believed to be locked in a vault somewhere being commercially developed, the Chocapic game is using primitive yet massive marketing reach (the backs of kid’s cereal boxes) to introduce similar game play, albeit on a more limited scale.

This is the way it’s supposed to work. New technology marries with existing distribution to create a whole new experience. Certainly, the Nestle undertaking is bone-simple, but imagine if certain addictive AR games or puzzles were mass-distributed as part of a transmedia campaign, where unlocking the games released key story information that pushed participants to channels otherwise hidden, like special blogs or subversive web narratives.

Suddenly, the back of a cereal box goes from an AR trinket used by perhaps .001 percent of the recipients (still happy with those results Best Buy?), to a valuable and re-playable piece of a larger story puzzle. That’ll get some people leaning forward.

And as a closing thought, why not make the entire box package something that can be used as part of the story? Half to create a playing surface, and the other half to create a wearable set of AR goggles (like the crude ones you can build following the video instructions at recomblu.com – see video below).

I wouldn’t want to walk the streets with a Chocapic branded gear box on my face, but I’ll bet there are thousands of kids who would steal daddy’s iphone to make it happen.

Jawbone Lab is a consultancy and management company that operates Jawbone.tv, the Web’s most relevant destination for narrative in the digital age. The Lab provides digital strategy services for unconventional marketing, communication and entertainment, combining access to a global network of talent from across all media with more than a decade of experience creating digital and interactive projects.