The Cracker Jack snacks have been known for including some kind of small trinket or toy inside. For a lot of kids the toy inside was one of the only reasons to beg parents for a box of Cracker Jacks. Well, the toy inside has been replaced with a digital reward.
According to Engadget, the PepsiCo Frito-Lay division over the Cracker Jack snacks have included a sticker inside each box that can be scanned by phones for a digital redemption. What sort of prizes do you get now when scanning the code from the sticker?
Well, according to the article there are four different digital activities. One of them includes a “Dance Cam” utilizing augmented reality to give the impression that you're dancing on the jumbotron, a race around field, as well as the ability to create baseball trading cards based on photos of yourself. It's pretty cool that the photos can be traded with friends and family as if they were actual trading cards, which is neat.
All of these activities are powered by an app called Blippar. The app Blippar is designed to utilize augmented reality across various business, edutainment and productivity apps. You can download the app from over on the official website. They're connected with more than a thousand different brands.
It's a show of the changing times where instead of physical goods they decided that digital goods would be a better fit for today's generation. One of the commenters on the Engadget article noted that this transition has been taking place for years already, as far back as 2013.
In today's climate everything is centered around digital interaction, so it makes sense that they would want to focus on that, even when it comes to rewards from purchasing snack foods. Mobile app usage and spending also makes up for a large part in gaming, so the tie-in with casuals makes a lot of sense.
In fact, in a recent report by Newzoo it was revealed that mobile gaming makes up for $30 billion of the $90 billion of the gaming industry's revenue intake. Instead of playing with plastic toys out of a snack box, a lot of kids these days are playing games on smart phones, tablets and other mobile smart devices... sometimes even to the detriment of their parent's credit card.
I don't know how well digital rewards will work for enticing kids to pick up a box of Cracker Jacks, but if the division thinks that it's the better route to go (it's obviously the cheaper route to go) then all the more power to them. There was something kind of fun and special with digging through the box to find a toy hidden inside. It means just a little less when instead of a cool toy (or a cheap toy) you only find a sticker that you scan with your iPhone or Android phone to access some app.
Either way, it's not like kids have much of a choice these days when it comes to what they're given when it comes to free rewards in snack boxes. So do you feel the switch from physical toys to digital toys is a “yay” or nay” decision for the Cracker Jack brand? Let us know in the comments below.
