Hair Food AR Game for Garnier Fructis (L'Oréal)
YORD designed and built a browser-based AR game for the Garnier Fructis Hair Food range. Players scanned a QR code to launch it — no app install — then caught ingredients in augmented reality to unlock rewards, and could share a video of their gameplay on social media for a chance at additional prizes. The experience ran on smartphones and tablets and drew 87,000 players in its first month.
Build a brand
L'Oréal wanted to raise awareness for the Garnier Fructis Hair Food range among a young, mobile-first audience that skips conventional advertising. The brief was an out-of-the-box AR idea: something people would choose to play with, and then choose to post.
The agency's contribution
YORD designed and developed the full AR gaming experience: the game mechanic and AR layer, the QR entry flow that opens it in the browser with no app install, the reward and prize logic, the social sharing path for gameplay videos, and the analytics behind it. Built to run on smartphones and tablets and to be updated in real time while the campaign was live.
What was delivered
87,000 players joined the AR experience in one month. Figure provided by YORD from the campaign; the counting method has not been independently verified here.
Measurement period: First month of the campaign
Challenge
L'Oréal wanted to raise awareness for the Hair Food range with an audience that scrolls past conventional advertising. The goal set for the project was blunt: raise brand awareness through out-of-the-box AR.
That ruled out anything with friction. If reaching the experience meant an app store download, most of the audience would never arrive — and if the reward for playing was not worth posting, the campaign would reach only the people the brand paid to reach.
Solution
We built an AR game that opens straight from a QR code in the phone's browser.
Players catch Hair Food ingredients in augmented reality to unlock rewards. Gameplay is recorded and shared to social media, where posting entered players into a draw for additional prizes — so the mechanic that made the game fun was also the mechanic that spread it.
Our scope: game design and AR development, the QR entry flow, the reward and prize logic, social sharing, and an analytics layer giving the client live visibility of play and share rates. Content could be updated in real time while the campaign was running.
Results
87,000 players joined the AR experience in its first month.
Entry was a QR scan rather than an app download, and sharing gameplay was built into the reward mechanic, so the experience was designed to spread through players' own posts rather than through paid placement alone.
