Comm Bank Vogue Codes

Commonwealth Bank brought a photo experience to Vogue Codes 2025 built around a single choice: pick the word you want your future to look like. Primatix built the AI photo booth behind it, to a brief from Imagination, the agency producing CommBank's presence at the summit.

Client: Imagination (Australia) for Commonwealth Bank
Event: Vogue Codes 2025
Location: Australia
Date: 14 June 2025

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 guest journey inside a strict QR policy

CommBank runs tight rules on QR codes. Signage on the stand couldn't point straight at a third-party URL, so the route into the experience had to run through a CommBank landing page carrying the link. That one policy shaped the whole journey.

The agency also weighed a staffed version, with team members holding iPads instead of guests using their own phones. That option asked for contact details before anyone could download their picture, which put a data-capture step in front of a queue that needed to keep moving.

Four constraints framed the build:

• Stand signage couldn't link directly to the experience, so entry had to route via a CommBank page.
• Guests needed their image without handing over an email address or a phone number.
• The live gallery had to render at the exact pixel ratio of the screen built into the stand.
• Every line of copy, the call to action and the activation T&Cs had to clear brand review before doors opened.

The Solution: "Pick Your Future-Focused Word"

A guest steps up, scans a QR code to a CommBank landing page and navigates to the AI Photo booth app, chooses one of nine word tiles, has their photo taken, and watches the portrait build around the word they picked. To collect it, download or share their images from on the results screen. No personal data is collected at that point, which is what made the no-form route workable. We take the same approach to guest data on every activation.

Smaller pieces mattered as much as the model work. We added instructional copy to the tile screen so the choice read clearly at a glance, wrote the activation T&Cs into the flow alongside the wider Vogue Codes terms, and rebuilt the gallery URL to the pixel dimensions the stand screen needed. The share link carries an OpenGraph description, so an image posted into a chat or a feed arrives with CommBank's own words and the #CommBankLife call to action rather than a bare URL. Guests also left with a print. Running it all in the browser follows the pattern we used for an association's virtual AI photo booth.

Why It Worked

• A QR handover at the end put the image on the guest's own phone in seconds, with no form in the way.
• Choosing a word gave every portrait a reason to exist beyond the photo, and gave CommBank a message to hang on it.
• Sizing the gallery to the stand screen meant the experience looked designed in, not dropped in.

Conclusion

Brand rules usually arrive after the creative is signed off, and they usually mean rebuilding something. Here the QR policy landed early enough to design around, and the answer turned out simpler than the workaround it nearly replaced.

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

Vogue Codes draws an audience that follows technology closely. Giving them a decision to make, then building the portrait around it, kept the technology in service of the message. We build every AI photo booth around that kind of specific, and the same thinking carried the TechnologyOne roadshow.