Project Overview.
Pebble Studios were approached by McCann Worldwide and Craft to collaborate on an exciting project to celebrate the relationship between Mastercard and The Brit Awards – championing the future of creative talent via an integrated marketing and communications campaign, in celebration of its 25-year headline sponsorship of The BRIT Awards.
Mastercard launched its advertising campaign at The BRIT Awards on Saturday 11th February, featuring work from 14 BRITs School students who were tasked to interpret Mastercard’s sonic brand in a range of different media; from costume to digital animation, to dance and music, bringing the sonic to life in new and exciting ways.
Creative Development.
To support the TVC and wider social campaign material, Pebble Studios were asked to bring the students work to life in Augmented Reality, for attendees live at The 02 as well as for the Awards shows global audience at home.
Working with McCann’s creative team and producers at Craft we proposed a number of AR concepts that supported the overarching campaign strategy and utilised the engaging technology and sharable qualities of Augmented Reality. We needed to build an experience that tied in seamlessly with the Mastercard OOH on site and provided the most seamless user journey for activation.
Because of these requirements we decided on using Instagram as our delivery platform, taking advantage of the growing functionality provided by SparkAR to create 3 custom AR animations that celebrated the students work and give the user an interactive and immersive view of their art.
Design & Technology.
Working closely with McCann and The Brit School artists we developed AR designs and animation that helped bring their artwork to life under the brand guidelines of Mastercard. By recreating 3D models of their art in Cinema4D and additional motion graphics in After Effects, we were able to import these builds into Spark AR – allowing us to develop prototypes and tests quickly, giving the client a practical view of the experience ambition and user journey early in the process.
With a much smaller file size limitation than we are accustomed to in animation it was important that our models and animations were built in a way that maximised the performance and optimisation of the experience.
Functionality.
As our AR experiences were created via Instagram, users could access our filters from anywhere – however to build awareness at The Brit Awards, we utilised McCann & Mastercard’s OOH takeover at The 02 with beautiful, bespoke creative that integrated a huge QR code that would automatically direct the user to our filters in Instagram stories.
Once on the platform users would be prompted to direct their camera toward the floor, this action triggering the appearance and animation of each artists display. Users could adjust the display positioning, resize it and move their camera around and through the interactive artwork – recording their experience to share with the world via their stories.