What can you get for a smile?

posted by roman, jarhead, kong
article by Thomas

Hi Jungle readers,

this time my gratitude goes to Thomas, who posted something very special and great over on facebook. I have asked him if he is interested to write a little article about it for the jungle as I think this article is pretty important. Thanks to you Thomas, my Kong Fu gratitude deep bow goes in your direction in slow motion. So from now on I am quoting Thomas:

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What can you get for a smile?

 Ice cream for example :)

Attending a marketing conference a few weeks ago, I came across something which I thought is absolutely worth sharing. The big food company Wall’s – famous for its different ice cream brands (i.e., Magnum) – has been working for months now on a new global marketing campaign that using one central theme: Share Happy.

While most of their “share happy” marketing is well… just marketing, there is one element to the campaign which touched me because it is a really, really cool idea: The world’s first smile-activated ice vending machine.

Combining face recognition software with an ice vending machine you get something that looks like this:

The machine activates as soon as it notices that someone is standing in front of it and it encourages you to use the touch display for getting free ice cream.
Free you say? Cool! And sure enough, after touching the display, you can select which kind of ice cream you would like to have.

Having selected the ice cream that I want, I realize that it isn’t money that the machine wants to see in return, but it wants to see a smile from me. A Smile-O-Meter displayed on the screen shows you how good your smiling performance is. As you can see, my first attempt wasn’t really good as I tried to to both, smiling and taking pictures, at the same time.

 My second attempt worked much better. :)

As soon as your smile performance convincing enough, the machine takes a picture of you and lets you share it on the Facebook page of the company that invented the machine. Oh, and of course you get your ice cream as a reward. 

I loved the fact that I got my ice cream for nothing else but a smile. What I loved even more was the fact that someone came up with such a beautiful idea.  

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Roman again:

Thanks a lot Thomas! 

This is what I thought too - it is so important to share it!

Thanks for your work and time and your smile :)