Love a KitKat? You’d love those chocolate-coated wafers even more if you were in the United Kingdom, where a new promotional campaign is enabling smartphone users to scan QR codes on KitKat wrappers to bring up intriguing YouTube content.
What’s it all about?
This certainly isn’t the first team-up between Nestlé, the British firm behind the globally popular KitKat brand, and Google, the owner of video sharing site YouTube. Previously, Google named its Android 4.4 operating system “KitKat”, while a campaign only last year allowed for YouTube content to loaded upon a voice command to the Google app.
However, one peculiar issue with that campaign, as we observed back then, was that users were unlikely to really need KitKat bars in order to view the videos – they were fairly easy to stumble across if you were a fan of both KitKat and YouTube. The new initiative addresses this to some extent, as each wrapper has a QR code corresponding to a specific video.
How to start viewing the content
While our readers outside the UK and Ireland might never get round to actually trying this, with the new campaign apparently limited to those countries at least for now, we were recently in the UK and decided to check out what Nestlé and YouTube are offering.
After buying a multipack of dark chocolate KitKat bars, pictured above, we downloaded a QR code scanning app onto an iOS device. There are many such apps to choose from, but we decided to go for MixerBox Inc.’s QR Code Reader & Barcode Scanner (Free Download), given the many positive reviews it has attracted on the App Store.
Nestlé has pointed out that each of the special edition KitKat packs sport, along with the YouTube logo, “eye-catching graphics relating to the video awaiting behind the QR code”. Therefore, to increase your chances of seeing a video you really like, it’s a good idea to first buy a pack with such graphics that seem to reflect your own tastes.
To give you an idea of what to expect: When we scanned the code on a pack showing what looked like an African drum, we were brought to a YouTube video of an African-style rendition of the Coldplay tune “Paradise”. On the other hand, when the pack displayed what resembled water blotches and a wave, we got a video of “The Slow Mo Guys” jumping theatrically into a swimming pool in slow motion. Making a splash in more ways than one!
So, what’s our ultimate verdict?
While all of the videos viewable through this QR code scanning can apparently still be viewed on YouTube without any strict need for a KitKat pack, this campaign could nonetheless help many chocolate munchers to enjoy great videos that might have otherwise escaped their notice. That’s a good reason to pick up a KitKat if you’re in the UK soon…