20,378 drive-to-store sessions for Karlsruhe city centre
Over the pre-Christmas trade, Karlsruhe city centre needed an interactive lever to steer passers-by into the local shops. Classic poster advertising creates attention but no direct conversion into bricks-and-mortar retail. UpReach delivered the concept: city-wide posters with a QR code, behind them the Virtual Booth as a smartphone-based photo experience with festive Karlsruhe backgrounds, and at the end a GDPR-compliant newsletter opt-in and a digital voucher that could be redeemed immediately in the participating shops. 20,378 sessions and 2,567 newsletter leads over the campaign run — with no hardware set-up in the city.
More than 200 B2B brands from across Europe trust UpReach — from agencies to enterprise corporations.
The initial situation
Like many city centres, Karlsruhe city centre is under pressure — online retail, pandemic after-effects, changed consumer habits. The pre-Christmas trade is the most important revenue phase for local retailers. A campaign was to drive footfall into the shops specifically while building a data pool for follow-up marketing by the city marketing company and the participating retailers.
The requirements were demanding: the activation had to be available across the entire city centre, without hardware being set up at every location. It had to be usable instantly — passers-by must not first have to download an app or create an account. And it had to offer an immediate, redeemable incentive that actually moves passers-by into the shops, not just to interact online.
The usual solution — photo-booth hardware at a single central location — would have been too locally bound and would not have reached most of the city.
The UpReach solution
UpReach went with the Virtual Booth — the browser-based photo experience with no physical hardware. Passers-by saw campaign posters with a QR code across the city centre. A scan opened the photo experience directly in the smartphone browser — no app download, no account, no waiting time.
The software was configured in the campaign design of the Karlsruhe city marketing company. Users could photograph themselves in front of festively staged backgrounds of Karlsruhe city centre — the market square, the palace, festively lit shopping streets — and personalise the photo with overlays and stickers. The AI background removal ran in the browser, with processing GDPR-compliant and consent before capture.
The real conversion lever was the digital voucher. Following the photo session came a GDPR-compliant opt-in: newsletter sign-up for the Karlsruhe city marketing company. After consent, participants received a voucher code by email that was immediately redeemable in the participating local shops. The photo itself could be downloaded and shared on social media — additional organic reach for the campaign. More on the set-up: /produkte/virtual-booth.
Setup & Logistics
Lead time six weeks: two weeks to produce the festively staged Karlsruhe backgrounds in coordination with the city marketing company, two weeks for the UI configuration of the Virtual Booth in the campaign CI including the sticker and overlay library, one week for the integration of the voucher logic and participant validation, one week for GDPR sign-off and end-to-end testing of the newsletter pipeline.
Distribution of the posters ran through the Karlsruhe city marketing company with its standard OOH partners — shop windows, advertising columns, street furniture. One QR code per poster, leading directly into the photo experience. No set-up, no hardware, no technical staff required on site.
Data pipeline: every newsletter consent was captured with a timestamp in the cloud dashboard and passed to the voucher-delivery engine. The city marketing company saw sessions, conversion rate (session to newsletter), voucher delivery and the distribution of the backgrounds used in real time. During the campaign, backgrounds or stickers could be updated over the air — for example for special occasions within the pre-Christmas period.
Results by the numbers
sessions
newsletter leads
seconds average interaction time
20,378 sessions over the campaign run showed the lever of the hardware-free activation: a physical photo station would never have achieved this reach across the entire city centre from a single location. QR-code posters turned every advertising column and every shop window into an activation point.
2,567 verified newsletter sign-ups are a direct data pool for the city marketing company and the follow-up marketing of the participating retailers. Every consent is documented with a timestamp and audit trail — GDPR-compliant and usable for regulated public-sector communication.
The average interaction time of 70 seconds per session shows: the photo experience was not a click-and-go, but genuine engagement with the campaign world — and therefore a quality touchpoint that produces more lasting brand recall than standard posters.
Key takeaways from this setup
The Virtual Booth beats hardware for city-wide campaigns: when an activation is to be available across an entire city centre, hardware is the wrong lever. QR-code posters turn every advertising column into a touchpoint — at a fraction of the cost and with no logistics effort for set-up, staff and maintenance.
Immediately redeemable incentives work better than prize draws: a digital voucher that can be redeemed in the next shop has a measurably higher newsletter conversion than a "you are entered in a prize draw" — because the value to the user is immediately tangible. For drive-to-store campaigns, that is the decisive mechanism.
Browser-based solutions break the app hurdle: every app download halves conversion. A photo experience running in the browser reaches all smartphone users with no technical preparation — decisive for low-threshold public-outreach formats.
UpReach Components Used
Hardware
None — the Virtual Booth is hardware-free and smartphone-based
Software 01
AI background removal (browser-based, GDPR-compliant with consent before capture)
Software 02
Virtual Booth (browser-based photo experience), sticker and overlay engine, GDPR newsletter opt-in, voucher-delivery engine, cloud dashboard with real-time metrics, OTA background updates
Drive-to-store for your city or retailer campaign
UpReach delivers hardware-free activations for city marketing, town-centre initiatives and local retailer associations — GDPR-compliant and ready to scale immediately.
