Ally employs Augmented Reality in its new Monopoly marketing campaign

Ally + Monopoly, an augmented reality boardgame, promotes financial literacy and offers chances to win a total of $1 million in prizes.

What's happening: The digital bank with over $180 billion in assets has launched a new marketing campaign that uses Augmented Reality to turn six American cities into live Monopoly boards.

• Ally + Monopoly is now live in Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, New York and Seattle.
• In those cities, over-sized Monopoly tokens and property spaces create a real world, AR scavenger hunt. Players use their smartphones to find the Ally + Monopoly squares in their cities. People outside the six designated cities can play online.
• Players can win daily and grand prizes like a Jeep Wrangler and other cash prizes by following directions on those squares.
• To produce the campaign, Ally turned to 8^th Wall, which enables markerless, interactive augmented reality content to run in a mobile browser, without the need to download an app.

For a good cause: Ally's AR game includes a Community Chest square, where players can raise money for their local Junior Achievement chapter just by landing on it.

• Ally will make a donation of $50,000 to Junior Achievement in the city with the most plays of the virtual Community Chest. Ally also will make a donation of $15,000 to Junior Achievement in the other five cities, totaling $125,000 nationally.
• Ally's campaign brings a focus to financial literacy and Junior Achievement is dedicated to giving young people the knowledge and skills they need to own their economic success.

Financial literacy: In general, Americans don't as confident as they'd like to be in improving their financial literacy and understanding of money concepts.

• New research from Ally shows games can be a useful tool in improving financial literacy and learning money concepts.
• According to a recent survey of over 2,000 U.S. adults age 18+ conducted for Ally by The Harris Poll, four in five (81%) Americans say money-related board games are helpful in teaching basic money concepts
• Seven in 10 who played money-related games as a child (71%) say doing so helped make them more comfortable with money concepts.

Ally's focus on serving its audience: This AR game is another example of how Ally uses creative and innovative thinking to provide advice and education to its constituency.

• Last Thanksgiving, Ally ran a Banksgiving campaign which highlighted the human component in its call centers. Ally's customer-first approach drives many of its product and marketing decisions.
• It's not the first time Ally has used AR as part of its marketing. In 2018, the bank ran Big Save, a campaign that superimposed bills on their home environment and encouraged users to plan and save for the future.
• “Ally + Monopoly is part of our ongoing strategy to make the ‘money talk’ less intimidating, giving people the confidence to talk about saving and spending, making investments, buying a home, and how to recover if they have a financial stumble,” said Andrea Brimmer, chief marketing and public relations officer at Ally.

Banks experiment with AR: Ally isn't the first bank to start playing around with Augmented Reality.

• Capital One has car shopping functionality built into its Auto Navigator. Point your iPhone at a car and the app will display pricing and finance information above the vehicle in real-time.
• The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) launched an AR home shopping app in 2011.
• The National Bank of Oman is using AR to help customers locate branches and ATMs, issuing special offers and deals to customers as they walk into a mall or retailer.