DOVE® Chocolate, proudly part of the Mars family of brands, uplifts, celebrates and empowers women entrepreneurs to take their businesses to the next level with the InstaGrants program. For the second year, the brand encouraged women to pitch their businesses for a chance to win one of three $10,000 InstaGrants.

This year’s program provided additional support beyond grants, including social promotion, a crowd sourcing opportunity with Indiegogo and an initiative to reach venture capital firms, which would take some creativity. Mars and Weber Shandwick created and led the campaign, and they worked with us to capture the winners’ pitches in volumetric video using AR codes in DOVE Chocolate baskets, helping them get in the door.

The entrepreneurs recorded their business pitches on a smartphone, then turned them into volumetric video holograms, volograms, using our technology and streamed into the viewer's phone with Arcturus HoloSuite as a WebAR experience with 8th Wall. Our team brought Arcturus for rapid post-production, to compress and encode the data for seamless AR playback across a large variety of devices.

“We wanted to get the entrepreneurs a seat at the table at venture capital firms, which we did in a guerilla-style approach. We leveraged cutting-edge technology to develop holograms of each winner giving their business pitches. The holograms were featured on QR codes in delicious DOVE Chocolate gift baskets, which when scanned, put our entrepreneurs in the room with the firms.” said Martin Terwilliger, Senior Director of Marketing at Mars Wrigley.

DOVE InstaGrants is inspired by the brand’s partnership with international humanitarian organization CARE to help improve the livelihoods of women in cocoa growing communities through increased access to savings, loans and other income generating support. DOVE InstaGrants was started as a way to bring the spirit of the brand’s work in West Africa to life in the U.S. by uplifting, celebrating and empowering women entrepreneurs.

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