Ready to Shop: See it. Shop it. Scan it.

Reimagining the shopping experience. Associated Media Publishing (AMP) is South Africa’s leading independent publishing house for women’s media brands. Their publications include Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, House and Leisure, Good Housekeeping and Women on Wheels. Our original brief was an awareness campaign for AMP’s QR Code Shopping Service: see something you like in your favourite magazine and shop it instantly from an online store using your smartphone. We saw our original brief — an awareness campaign to let Cosmo readers know that they can now buy directly from the magazine using QR codes — as more than that: the power to create a sub-brand for all of AMP’s publications. So we took the QR code, a recognisable and widely-used technology that usually lingers quietly on the sidelines, and placed it front and centre. By doing so, and by using the QR code as a dynamic informer of the design, we were able to turn the launch of a tired, grayscale and functional platform into an exciting, energetic and colourful campaign. We wanted to create an ownable, hyper-modern brand language and a beautiful, simple association between the magazines and the fact that you can shop anywhere, anytime. So we put the QR code front and centre, the departure point from which the new identity could flow. The resultant brand system has a stark modernity that gives it an immediate association with the magazine and shopping. The system was also built into a beautiful video, now used across multiple platforms.