TAMBA Internet

UK holiday company Butlins has today launched a free augmented reality app, created by social media and marketing agency TAMBA.

The app has been released to celebrate the most significant investment since Sir Billy Butlin set up the camp in 1936 – the opening of the £25 million Wave Hotel and Apartments in Bognor Regis.

Once downloaded, users need to open the app and point the camera at the seahorse glyph – which can be downloaded from www.butlins.com/glyph or found throughout the Wave Hotel and Apartments – then watch as an octopus pops out of the porthole and waves hello, before shooting off the screen. Users can also take fun screenshots with the app whilst it’s in use.

This is the latest campaign TAMBA have produced for Butlins after the game Happy Days, launched in Summer 2011 went on to win a Roses Design Award 2012 and a Travel Marketing Award 2012.

Jae Hopkins, Head of Communications at Butlins said “Commissioning TAMBA to do exciting new digital projects is becoming a bit of a habit at Butlins! They’ve just completed our “Butlins Augmented Reality” app for iPhone and Android and we couldn’t have been more thrilled with the way the project went. Far too late in the day we decided we wanted to something funky to celebrate the opening of our Wave Hotel & Apartments and asked TAMBA to come up with a proposal. The fact that we got from that proposal to printing a working glyph in national newspapers on the day the hotel opened a matter of weeks later is testament to the way TAMBA work.

The TAMBA team are especially good at suggesting ways to improve what we’ve asked for and/or explaining why an alternative approach might be better. They can also simplify the technological terminology enough for a mere marketer without ever sounding patronising. And they are a straightforwardly nice bunch of people to work with. We’re looking forward to the next project”.

Amy Macdonald, one of Europe’s biggest selling singer songwriters, returns this Summer with a brand new album ‘Life In A Beautiful Light’. The first single ‘Slow It Down’ will be released on 11^th June and looks set to take her straight back to the top of the European charts.

As part of the promotional activities to spread the word about the album and single amongst Amy’s fans, TAMBA were recently engaged to create a Facebook game based around Amy’s passion for cars.

The game, also entitled Slow It Down, tasks players with helping Amy make it to her gigs in time, picking up instruments dropped by her band along the way. It may sound simple but driving over the instruments too fast will cause them to smash so the trick is to Slow It Down! See what we did there?

The game also has a competition element so players can enter the scoreboard to be in with a chance of winning tickets to see Amy live at some of her festival appearances.

“We are delighted to have been awarded the brief from Universal. Amy’s fans are digital natives and as such are a natural fit for a gaming experience. Amy loves her new cartoon identity and has already been sharing it with her fans on Twitter!” said TAMBA CEO, Kay Hammond.

Play the game on Facebook here.

An unknown alien life form who landed on earth today has had to learn the English language to get by in a range of social situations… Don’t panic, it’s just the plot of Academy Island – a new social media game by TAMBA designed to help learners improve their English language ability.

Academy Island is a free educational game aimed at English language learners. It’s available from the University of Cambridge ESOL Examination’s (Cambridge ESOL) official Facebook page – which currently has over 120,000 fans.

Players of Academy Island progress through different difficulty levels by helping the alien use English in a range of situations such as shopping in a bakery and visiting places such as an art gallery and library.

“Educational computer games can be a really good way of exposing learners to the English language and this has been the driving force behind Academy Island,” explains Cambridge ESOL’s Digital Manager Lorna Pedersen. She continues “We’ve worked with experts to create an environment which encourages learners to improve their key language skills in a progressive but fun way.”

A team of language experts from Cambridge ESOL who work on the actual exam papers came up with the questions and tasks to ensure they were pitched at an appropriate level for learners of English. They worked closely with TAMBA – an award-winning digital marketing agency who specialise in social media games. Players who take on the Academy Island challenge can post their scores on a global leader board through their Facebook profile.

Kay Hammond, CEO of TAMBA, said: “We were delighted to win this brief as edugaming is often overlooked. Gamifying the learning experience increases emotional investment, helping the player acquire knowledge almost subconsciously through interaction with the game environment”.

Try the game for yourself here.