Tree things about Stella Artois trading E's for Christmas trees campaign

Saving trees and drinking beer.

Stella Artois today announced their augmented reality "Send a Card, Save a Tree" Christmas ecard campaign. Aiming to plant [or save or something like that] a million trees in the Argentinean Atlantic Rainforest [where the f*** is that], when a million ecards have been sent [wow - how many is that]. A jolly good Stella idea, which nobody can deny [US version] / and so say all of us [EN version].

Here are "tree" things I noticed.

1. It took five [gold ring pulls] to get past the [enter] DOB / location bit to even get started. The connect with Facebook link appeared to do nothing and the page kept locking up - like a mahogany chainsaw jam.

2. To get the whole 3D augmented reality xmas wizard ecard experience you need a webcam [I don't have one Santa!] and a "marker image" [WTF is that Santa?]. You are "present[ed]" with two ways to get the marker image 1. Print it out on your home printer [on paper, erm that's trees?], or 2. Download it to your mobile phone. Now, considering this is a tree-hugging campaign, I'd say the print at home option is a pretty ill-thought-out idea - no?

3. The whole thing is properly overly complicated to use, so not everyone will get to enjoy the full-bodied festive flavour. Definitely not after the 4 pint threshold. The "Claus" is lost in the confusion. There's "snow-way" my mum will get it. A simple "cut-down" version would save more trees?

I don't want to p**s on the Stella Christmas parade. It's nearly Christmas after all; a time for joy and a time for giving. Yes it's absolutely a good idea 4 good, and yes it's full of festive fun, but, maybe, M. Stella jumped the gun and didn't fully think it through? An extra day at the thinking before drinking table is worth its weight in gold/frankincense/mer[d*] [*French / Belgian spelling].

Oh, and like I said in our chat on Twitter, yes I'm very excited about Christmas and especially picking up my "sleigh-n" Christmas tree next weekend [oops!].

My campaign score card:

Goodwill: 5.0 ABV / 5.0 ABV
Execution: 8 pints [too many]
Timing: Good things come to those who wait.
Transparency: Clearly a few million email addresses to plunder is a result in anyone's book / Kindle etc.

Anyway, try it for yourself [responsibly] and tell Santa what you think in the comments box below ---> Go on send an eCard and save a tree with Stella Artois. Just do it OK.

P.S. Stella have not sent me a slab of fizzy festive fun to write this post, but I'd gladly retract some of it for an advent sized [24 x cans] slab of the wife-beater. Or a shiny new webcam.

P.P.S. Stella - have you got a cool "widget" that I can post on my blog for my blog fans to post ecards? [Whatever you do - do not scroll down].

P.P.P.S. Read stuff about other recent online campaigns that are clever - like the IKEA Facebook thing or the SonyEricsson Space Hopper thing.