Google, a global leader in technology, recognized that the traditional product launch playbook had grown tired and saw an opportunity to connect new technology with people's everyday lives in a more meaningful way. For its Made by Google 2025 event, Google established a new vision for the launch centered on a human-centric, entertainment-driven format. To bring the product demonstration component of this strategy to life, Google engaged us as their experiential partner to fundamentally reimagine the event’s demo area. Our solution was to design and build an immersive sandbox, a collection of interactive stations that allowed guests to experience the new products in authentic, real-world scenarios.

In just six weeks, our team delivered a fully-realized, immersive product sandbox. Our scope included managing all front-of-house operations, graphics, and staffing, but the centerpiece of our work was the concepting, design, and fabrication of five unique interactive demos. We moved away from placing products on pedestals, instead building distinct “mini-scenes” that mirrored real-world environments. For instance, we created an intimate New York café to demonstrate the Pixel phone’s low-light camera capabilities and a record store to highlight a new music discovery feature. This strategy made the technology feel approachable and intuitive, inviting guests to discover its features through hands-on, playful exploration.

The interactive design of the sandbox also served as a powerful content engine. The immersive, real-world scenes provided the perfect backdrop for the A-list talent and creators attending the event to produce authentic, engaging content chronicling their experiences. This generated a steady stream of user-generated content that extended the hands-on experience to millions of their followers at home, transforming a physical installation into a global digital moment.

The success of this strategy was immediately evident in audience engagement. Where attendees at past events might have spent just a few minutes in a demo hall, they were now staying for extended periods to interact with the products. This dramatic increase in dwell time, combined with the influential voices sharing their genuine experiences, had a powerful ripple effect. The authentic, hands-on stories from talent and press gave coverage of the products far more narrative impact. Our work proved that by designing experiences where people can discover what a product can do for them, a launch moment can be transformed into sustained brand equity.

Since its inception in 2006, Riot Games has been on a mission to create immersive games that redefine the player experience. With the 2009 launch of League of Legends, Riot didn’t just introduce a game; they sparked a global phenomenon. Today, the impact is staggering—if League of Legends' active players formed a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world. Each month, players collectively spend over 100 million hours diving into its universe.

As the gaming landscape continued to evolve, Riot Games remained committed to pushing boundaries and enhancing player experiences. At Anime Friends 2024, the largest anime and Asian pop culture event in Latin America, Riot Games sought our help in bringing fans into the world of League of Legends in a powerful, captivating and wholly new way. With our event activation strategy and the goal of driving awareness and brand engagement for the title and its new cooperative game mode, we teamed up with the developer to captivate event attendees and deepen the connection between Riot Games and its passionate community of fans.

Riot Games kicked off the process by bringing their deep understanding of player expectations to the table, which informed the strategy and creative direction. With that, our experience experts employed meticulous production techniques to translate Riot Games’ vision into a tangible, unforgettable experience with a 152m2 footprint.

Themed around Anima Squad, an in-game event that originally launched in 2022 but returned in 2024 for a limited time, the booth served as a portal into the game’s universe. Attendees had the chance to peek at the latest game mode and newly launched skins (outfits worn by Champions, the game’s player-characters), including a reimagining of classic League of Legends Champions as cybernetic, animal-themed warriors.

The standout experience at the Riot Games booth, and at Anime Friends 2024 overall, was a massive, finely crafted prop: a two-meter-tall replica of the sword wielded by Aatrox, a popular League of Legends Champion. Fabricated by our specialists, the sword was equipped with dynamic LED lighting and special effects, including stage smoke, that instantly transported attendees into the League of Legends universe—and served as a perfect spot for selfies.

Adding to the interactivity, we launched the new cooperative game mode at the event, Swarm, giving visitors the chance to dive into the action firsthand and continue their League of Legends journey long after Anime Friends 2024. From our experiential marketing efforts and interactive design to the sturdy construction of the booth and the lifelike details of the replicas, our team’s commitment to excellence ensured that Riot Games’ creative vision was brought to life with precision and flair.

Over the last four decades, digital transformation has been the catalyst for growth. However, a new generation of digital natives with distinctive and high expectations has emerged. As experts in brand experience, we see every brand touchpoint as an opportunity to inspire, engage and innovate.

Our approach is centered around the power of bringing strategic, creative and in-house production together. We deliver award-winning, big-idea thinking through our unparalleled storytelling, exceptional craft and industry-defining digital expertise. 

As experts in brand experience design, we work to elevate and innovate your brand through every single consumer touchpoint.

We are your consultancy, agency and production arm all in one, specifically designed to help modern brands looking to disrupt, differentiate, and innovate everywhere customers interact with them. We exist to make complex problems simple.

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Ellinikon is Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, and serves as an incredible look into the future of urban spaces. LAMDA Development, the leading real estate developer in Greece, hired Monks to build an experience center from the ground up that brings its 20-year vision for Ellinikon to life today. We transformed an old airport hangar into an interactive journey that invites visitors to immerse themselves within scenes from the area’s past, present and future—a synergistic experience that blends physical and digital design.

Upon checking into the Experience Center, visitors are given a personalized boarding pass—a reference to the space’s heritage of air travel. Augmented by RFID, the pass connects visitors to personalized experiences as they make their journey throughout the center. The first stop is an interactive maquette, or scale model, that showcases highlights of the development and provides a holistic, data-driven view of the Ellinikon master plan.

The beating heart of the development is the Ellinikon Park, which we paid tribute to through a multisensorial exhibit that invites visitors to become acquainted with the park’s landmarks and its native flora. An interactive map offers insight into local amenities and essential info, while a digitally enhanced botanical library display tells the stories of plants that are integral to the park and Greece at large. Those looking for a more active and scenic view of the park can take a virtual bike ride through the grounds and even enjoy a birds-eye view of its impressive sites. Meanwhile, those in a seafaring mood can explore the future vision of the Riviera on an XR-enhanced virtual yacht ride.

Elinikon will put Greece on the map as an example of human ingenuity and creating a new way of living: the smartest and greenest district of Europe. To help visitors reimagine a better urban future, we designed a series of displays that explore Ellinikon’s various innovations, all housed in a mesmerizing corridor mimicking the night sky. After getting a taste of Ellinikon’s vision, visitors are encouraged to share their own ambitions by wishing on a star and contributing to the shimmering galaxy above.

To help visitors truly envision life within Ellinikon, we staged a luxurious residential living space with story-driven, interactive experiences seamlessly embedded throughout. The RFID-enabled pass allowed us to personalize every interaction, making it even easier for people to imagine their home within the future of urban living. Finally, a panoramic view gives a glimpse into the Ellinikon vision, with sweeping views captured at different times of day and different floor levels.

While flowing from one experience or display to the next, visitors can stop to take a rest in the Free City Space, which connects navigation patterns and play areas into one cohesive wayfinding system. Over the course of their journey, visitors engage with 22 bespoke experiences and 120 minutes of content. From creative direction to production to content development, we blended over a dozen capabilities to bring the Ellinikon master plan to life for visitors from around the world, translating an ambitious plan for urban living into tangible reality.

How do you replicate a non-fungible world? That’s the challenge we ran into when bringing one of the most successful PFP projects—Cool Cats—to NFT.NYC, the biggest NFT conference on this side of the screen. Enter Cooltopia, an immersive, purr-fect recreation of the Cool Cats universe spanning four zones and a series of interactive installations. With the aim to educate and excite conference attendees, the gamified journey inspired blockchain buffs and the crypto-curious alike to step into Cool Cats’ digital world.

“Curiosity killed the cat” may be a popular aphorism, but we wanted to encourage a sense of discovery within our feline flock. Throughout the world, attendees had the chance to explore scenes like a life-sized pirate ship, a gravity-defying room, a marshmallow mountain and more in search of loot boxes and points they could redeem for real prizes. NFT holders had access to exclusive missions doled out by our “Cat Detectives,” like solving riddles or finding hidden characters. With so many ways to play and engage, Cooltopia struck a balance between educating newcomers and helping holders feel part of something big and exclusive. In fact, most attendees weren’t Cool Cats holders, making Cooltopia their entrypoint into the world.

Despite Cool Cats’ roots in the virtual world, NFT holders loved being able to enjoy IRL benefits from their tokens. To build interoperability between the physical and virtual, our experiential team collaborated closely with in-house experts in Web3 and NFTs. Leveraging their intuition and passion in the space, it’s no surprise that Cooltopia was the cat’s meow among some of Web3’s biggest enthusiasts at NFT.NYC.

To celebrate the 2022 NHL season play-off, we partnered with Sportsnet to launch Hockeyland: an immersive, hockey-themed adventure map available on the Mineraft Marketplace. Conceived by our in-house creative team, Hockeyland aims to inspire hockey fandom among a new, younger generation by bringing the sport to their “home ice”: one of the best-selling video games of all time. Combining best-in-class game design and metaverse strategy with executional expertise from Blockworks UK, one of a select few content creators certified by Microsoft to produce and distribute content on the Minecraft Marketplace, we helped Sportsnet deliver an accessible Minecraft experience that allows anyone to discover the sport in a fun and familiar way.

It’s not a true Minecraft experience without mining for precious resources to power-up your character and shape your environment. We built Hockeyland around a handful of familiar gamified elements designed to help players hone their skills and ice out the competition in their quest to be the best. Players can craft hockey equipment like helmets, stick upgrades, shoulder pads and more to strengthen their abilities, then put them to the test in a series of challenges against enemy Grinders (that’s hockey lingo for players who pressure opponents through physical force). From target practice in the Hockey Stick Forest to racing down the Ice Track Course, players can see if they have what it takes to achieve the game-winning goal: scaling the frigid heights of Playoff Peak to stand the literal top of the world.

When it comes to inspiring the next generation of fans, Sportsnet knows where the puck is headed: today’s audiences crave interactive environments where they can play and connect. Hockeyland is a first-of-its kind experience that signifies the broadcaster’s new approach to reaching Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences in immersive ways. In addition to meeting younger generations where they already are, we amplified the experiential marketing engagement with a 360-degree campaign spanning Sportsnet social channels, a Twitch paid media buy and organic outreach with Minecraft-focused content creators. Altogether, the metaverse strategy helped bring a beloved sport to life in a new medium—where Sportsnet can continue to grow and build for years to come.

As one of the most popular language learning apps in the world, Duolingo is known for its bite-sized lessons, game-like elements and community features. With humorous exercises that drill users on new phrases, the app has earned a reputation for being the “memeable” brand of the moment—its cheerful identity embodied by Duo, the beloved bird mascot. But while Duolingo had introduced millions to new languages, another emerged for them to master: the metaverse’s. Realizing that this space was a perfect match for Duolingo’s playful nature, we partnered with the brand to take over two of the hottest metaverse platforms, Roblox and Decentraland, and connected with people where the spirit of play reigns supreme.

In celebration of Duo’s 10th birthday, we dropped a free asset pack on Roblox and invited all developers to join the Game Jam, a seven-day, non-competitive event where everyone got the chance to submit their own Duolingo-inspired games. Leveraging the community-oriented aspect of the platform, we gave Duo’s meme fame a cheeky twist with an event where the audience had the power to create—and the desire to share. To do so, we ensured all developers were rewarded with prominent placement on Duolingo’s Roblox hub. Meanwhile, those who played the games were rewarded with coin multipliers, which they could redeem to purchase a custom-made, one-of-a-kind Duolingo avatar.

While the Roblox community was building games, we were busy building a two-story statue of Duo in Decentraland’s Terra Zero, a space frequented by passers-by on their way to visit the golf course and other popular attractions. A play on his pushy nature, the icon was placed at the edge of the leisurely Golf Craft so that Duo could remind unsuspecting visitors to complete their daily streak of language lessons. 

With Duo now roaming the metaverse to persistently remind people there to improve their language skills, it’s no longer a hiding spot for procrastinators. Proving how fun and games can go a long way in building relationships, this metaverse takeover left an indelible mark on the minds of visitors—who will never skip their lessons again.

Awards shows are historically exclusive affairs viewed by audiences from afar. So, true to its roots in transforming culture through digital creativity, the Song Breaker Awards took a new approach to the show format: hosting an experience that is interactive, creator-led and open to everyone with an internet connection. We partnered with Logitech For Creators to bring the show to Roblox, paying tribute to the digital creators who are driving culture though music, dance challenges and memes. Hosted by Bretman Rock and featuring performances by singer-songwriter GAYLE and multi-GRAMMY award-winning artist Lizzo, the Song Breaker Awards became the first music awards show in the metaverse.

Prior to the big show, visitors had the chance to explore a futuristic urban hub bristling with engaging experiences. A key innovation of the Roblox platform was the Selfie XL, which snapped users’ avatars to recreate larger-than-life copies that towered over the city. Visitors could view these enormous models from several angles on a rollercoaster that zipped throughout the world. And because no show is complete without a souvenir, we opened the doors to a digital shop featuring avatar clothes and accessories based on Logitech’s lineup of creator-focused products, as well as Lizzo merch. Proceeds from every purchase benefited MusiCares, which supports the music community through preventative, emergency and recovery programs.

Visitors got to warm up for the main event by joining TikTok creators Cost n’ Mayor in the hottest dance trends, featuring custom animated Roblox emotes—only for the show to be interrupted by Steven, a catty stormcloud throwing everything into disarray. Realizing the event’s theme of “Together We Create,” viewers and honorees partnered up to leverage the power of creativity and defeat Steven. Not to be upstaged, Lizzo and GAYLE offered lifelike performances using state-of-the-art motion capture, capping off the narrative-driven, interactive awards show viewed by over 6 million visitors.