BT Sport has launched a series of beer mats, bar towels and t-shirts designed to work with augmented reality company Blippar’s software.
Punters will be able to hold their phones up to the so-called digital pub ephemera to activate video clips and interactive content, triggered by Blippar AR tags. Interactive pub trinkets will be emblazoned with the taglines ‘Great Sport Happens Here’ and ‘Blipp This Mat’.
As well as this, BT Sport-branded toilet door stickers, featuring a man kicking a football (in reference to the multitude of football coverage) and a woman holding a tennis racket (in reference to BT’s coverage of WTA matches) have been sent out along with posters featuring a round up of BT’s sports coverage.
Read Recombu Digital’s guide to BT SportBruce Cuthbert, director of commercial customers at BT Sport, said:
“We want to bring a few innovations to our offer to pubs and clubs. We think it is going to be great that your beer mat can be scanned to deliver some fantastic sporting action clips to your smartphone, instead of merely soaking up spillages.
“We hope that this is going to add a bit of extra spice and interest to pub banter around the fantastic line up of sports, including exclusively live Premier League football, FA Cup, Europa League, as well as Aviva Premiership rugby.”
BT has now announced its line up of Premier League football matches for the August-December period of the 2013/14 season. All of the BT Sport games so far will take place on Saturday lunchtimes, meaning the pub regulars can assemble at the local at the same time every week.
BT is keen to make inroads into the pub market as it sees it as another way to bring the fight to Sky Sports. BT has pledged to undercut Sky by such a margin that it reckons the satellite TV operator will need to lower its prices to stay in the the pub market. Earlier this year, BT cheekily launched a series of decidedly non-interactive beer mats to herald its arrival.
Blippar is available to download now for free in iTunes and Google Play.
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