Comm Bank Vogue Codes

Snapmatic was engaged by Imagination Australia to put a browser-based AI photo experience on the Commonwealth Bank stand at Vogue Codes 2025, built so a guest could walk away with their image without handing over a single contact detail.

Client: Commonwealth Bank (CommBank), delivered for Imagination Australia
Event: Vogue Codes 2025
Location: Australia
Date: June 2025

Imagination, CommBank's agency on the activation, owned the creative concept, including the "choose your future-focused word" idea that shaped the whole guest journey. Our role was delivery: turning that concept into a working web experience that met the bank's rules and ran on the stand.

CommBank published its own writeup of the summit a month later, with a recap video that shows the booth running on the stand. The piece is about what the sponsorship was for: getting more women into AI and technology roles, told through employees who moved into them from other careers. That is what the nine words on the tiles were pointed at.

The Challenge: A Bank's Rules, A Guest's Ten Seconds

CommBank applies strict governance to QR codes, so the usual route of pointing a phone camera at a Snapmatic code on the stand was off the table from the first conversation. Anything the activation asked of a guest also had to survive a busy summit floor, where people are between sessions and unlikely to fill in a form to see a picture of themselves.

The brief from Imagination landed on four constraints:

• Guests had to reach the experience through a CommBank landing page rather than scanning a Snapmatic code directly.
• Stand staff wanted iPads running in kiosk mode, without turning the moment into a data capture.
• Output needed to work as a phone download and as a print at the stand.
• Copy, terms and the call to action were still moving in the week before install.

The Solution: "Choose Your Future-Focused Word"

We built the whole thing as a web app, so it ran identically on the iPads on stand and on a guest's own phone via a link placed on CommBank's landing page. The interaction opened on a grid of nine tiles, each carrying a future-focused word from Imagination's concept. The word a guest picked drove the AI portrait they got back, which gave the activation a point of view instead of a generic filter. No hardware shipped to Sydney, which is the same delivery model behind TechnologyOne's virtual AI photo booth roadshow.

Kiosk mode was the part that made the data question disappear. On a shared iPad the guest never types anything: they scan a QR on the results screen to pull the image onto their own phone, so nothing personal is collected at the stand. The results page carried CommBank's "Share your image using #CommBankLife" call to action, and we added an OpenGraph description to the gallery URL so a link shared into WhatsApp or a social feed previewed with the right copy rather than a bare address. We also reformatted the gallery URL to the exact pixel ratio Imagination specified for the stand screens, and aligned the activation's additional terms to the wider Vogue Codes event T&Cs. Our AI photo booth handled the print path off the same build.

Why It Worked

Working to the client's compliance rules rather than around them kept the experience live. A landing-page link is slower than a direct scan, and it was the version CommBank could actually approve, so that is what we built. Designing the kiosk path with zero personal data entry removed the other objection at the same time, a pattern we cover in more depth in our note on enterprise-grade security for AI brand activations.

The split of responsibilities helped too. Imagination held the creative and the client relationship, we held the build, and that meant concept decisions and technical constraints were resolved by the people closest to each. Building in the browser meant late changes stayed cheap: text on the word-selection screen, the hashtag call to action and the terms all landed in the final week and went straight into the live build during the testing window, ahead of an install on the evening of Friday 13 June and doors at 08:00 the next morning.

Conclusion

Financial services activations carry more rules than most, and those rules usually arrive after the creative is signed off. Vogue Codes showed that a browser-based build absorbs them: the QR policy, the no-data-capture requirement and the shifting copy and workdlow were all accommodated without changing what the guest actually experienced.

Because we build our own tech stack - not piggybacking off another platform - we can build everything bespoke for custom activations and workflows.

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Imagination's nine-word grid is the detail we would keep. It gave a bank's audience something to choose rather than something to pose for, in the same way the virtual AI photo booth we ran for an association gave remote attendees a reason to open the link. For teams planning something similar locally, we have written up what to expect from running an AI photo booth in Australia.