Immersing local readers in a global community of book lovers.

For our bookmarks, we used stylish illustrations to show our connected World of Book Lovers. Characters were shown holding, sharing and reading from books, whilst speech bubbles showed what they loved about them. All kinds of people, all kinds of books, all kinds of book lovers.

We created a single image, and then to encourage collectability and repeat purchases, we split this image across four separate bookmarks. Consumers could recreate the whole image only when they had each of the bookmarks. We added a little extra incentive by offering prizes to the first people who posted images on social of the four bookmarks connected together.

Meanwhile, our experience of creating Instagram filters (which add exciting/quirky/branded graphical elements to users’ stories) had already demonstrated how engaging these can be. On average, people who use filters do so for an average of 75 seconds – four times longer than watching a social video – and of course leading to a deeper engagement with the brand.

The idea for the filter was to change each user into one of the characters from our illustrated World of Book Lovers bookmarks. To do that, we created a clever AR filter that ‘read’ the user, before identifying them as a certain kind of reader, such as ‘The Creative’, ‘The Overexcited’, or ‘The Encyclopedia’.

The filter then added props and costume elements which brought the characteristics of that reader to life; perfect for sharing to that user’s story feed. And of course with multiple types of reader, engagement was amplified as users explored the other options in the filter.

The idea and illustrative style of A World of Book Lovers unified the whole campaign, but to ensure the theme was always front of mind, we also designed an icon for the campaign which not only became the filter’s identifying button, but was also considered for t-shirts and badges.

The Instagram filter was an instant success. In just over two weeks, the filter had over 10,000 views, with hundreds of book lovers using it to find and share exactly what kind of book lover they were.

The client was extremely happy with the impact the campaign had, particularly with the extra dimension the filter added to the activity.

With engagement continuing to grow to a fantastic rate of 15%, we’re pleased to say that our client has confirmed plans to commission more filters from us in 2023.

The bookmarks were also a great success, leading to an increase in traffic to the website, plus hundreds of competition entries were received from customers collecting all four bookmarks. All in all, a fantastically successful campaign.