It’s fall, which means plenty of leaves are piling up. But before you burn them or bag them, you might want to snap a photo – and turn those leaves into coupons.
It will help if you’re in Canada, where the maple leaf is more than just something to be raked up. It’s a national symbol – and now it’s a coupon for free ice cream.
Dairy Queen’s Canadian division has launched a unique promotion, in which every fallen maple leaf can be transformed into a coupon.
“Canadians love fall,” Dairy Queen explained. “Every year, they stop to capture the magic of the season. So to celebrate our fall flavors, Dairy Queen made every leaf worth more.”
DQ fans can use the “Falling Treats” Snapchat Lens to take a photo of a fallen maple leaf. The interactive experience will instantly scan the leaf, verify it as an actual maple leaf, and transform that leaf into a digital coupon in the DQ app for a special treat. Beginning today, the coupon is for a free small shake. Previously, leaf-scanners could get an 85¢ Mini Blizzard Treat with a $1 minimum purchase.
The campaign is a creative way to get customers engaged – and a creative way to boost ice cream sales as the weather turns cooler. To emphasize that ice cream is not just a summertime treat, DQ Canada now features new and returning fall flavors, like pumpkin pie, caramel toffee and maple cookie.
“Falling Treats takes something uniquely Canadian – the simple act of spotting a maple leaf – and turns it into a fun reason to indulge this fall,” DQ Canada’s vice president of marketing Candida Ness said in a statement.
What’s especially unique about this campaign is that it could be the largest ever in terms of distribution. Trillions of maple leaves can be found across the country – and that means trillions of unique coupon codes.
“Typically, when you run a promo/discount campaign, you’re limited by the reach of your coupons,” Ness said. “What we loved about this campaign was that it turned an abundant resource in Canadian life during autumn, falling leaves, into something any Canadian could find and redeem.”
It’s the latest example of a gamified coupon campaign, in which digital platforms allow for much more creativity than static printed campaigns. Earlier this year, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity honored some of the previous year’s most creative coupon campaigns. The big winner was Ziploc’s “Preserved Promos” campaign, in which participants could upload an image of an expired grocery coupon to earn a discount on their next Ziploc purchase. Runners-up included a Hellmann’s campaign that transformed photos of unused takeout ketchup packets into coupons for Hellmann’s mayonnaise, and a Brazilian retailer that printed unique coupon codes on individual pieces of confetti visible in photos of a championship soccer match celebration.
So Dairy Queen hopes its newest coupon campaign gets Canadians buzzing – and maybe earns some awards of its own next year. The Falling Treats campaign runs through November 9th. After that, DQ fans will have to pay for their own ice cream – and decide for themselves what to do with all those “expired” maple leaves.
