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”.