While a clear distinction between art and advertising may not always exist, consumers have a sixth sense for ads that tug at the heartstrings with one hand and their wallets with another.

What makes the difference between a campaign that delightfully intervenes rather than one that merely interrupts, and how can you begin to develop and conceptualize such a creative piece? With MediaMonks’ Water Ripples installation as an example (produced in collaboration with Stella Artois, Mother New York and Water.org), we’re diving into three main ingredients that make up an artful intervention.

And that’s really the test for elevating something to an art form—helping your audience situate themselves and your brand within a larger framework of social good, taking them outside of themselves and their everyday. While aesthetic beauty is ideal for creating a memorable campaign, it’s that self-identification with the human condition that leaves a lasting impact.

Thirsty for more? Read more about Water Ripples from FWA.

1. A Culturally Relevant Purpose

Both works of art and advertising evoke emotion in the audience, which means a particularly artistic campaign should have a clear, culturally relevant value proposition or purpose. A good place to find inspiration is to back a cause or highlight an issue that you feel aligns with your business or audience. And consumers agree: to a Sprout Social study from earlier this year, about two thirds of them think it’s important for brands to take a social stance, so don’t be shy. While it may seem risky, an experience or campaign that drives social good connects to audiences on a human level–and demonstrates your business’ desire to be socially responsible. Even if you aren’t able to solve the world’s problems, you can at least aim to unite people together or ask them to contemplate their place in society, just like any work of art or literature would.

The Water Ripples piece aimed to portray Stella Artois’ care for the clean water effort. And that’s a great cause for a brewery: beer is 90 to 95% water, after all. Through the use of 600 motor-controlled water droplets to replicate the look of rippling water, the installation beautifully depicted the “rippling effect” that the brand and installation participants made in social impact.

2. An Experience that Enhances the Environment

Whether you’re building a large-scale art installation or want to play with a digital platform in a unique way, cleverly intervening with your audience’s everyday environment can go a long way in striking an emotional or empathetic connection between themselves and your cause.

While the Water Ripples’ most outstanding feature is its visuals, its biggest effect on viewers and participants was that it provided a quiet, contemplative and meditative space—a stark contrast to the hustle-and-bustle of Grand Central Station during commuting time.

3. Audience Agency

Every good campaign should have a call to action, but an artistic one should offer a call to contribution—and that contribution should prompt participants to feel as though they’ve made a significant impact or connection with other people in the world (and hopefully your brand, too). How do you allow participants to immerse themselves in the cause by providing an experience?

To answer this question, the team behind the Water Ripples installation accounted for several tiers of participation, including those who answered the call to contribution as well as those who were simply passing by. Participants who made a financial contribution by purchasing a limited-edition Stella Artois chalice were able to make the water ripple, symbolically signifying the impact of their participation—and providing delight to those viewing from afar with the beautiful show.

Helping your audience place themselves within the grand scheme of the human experience doesn’t have to be that lofty—sometimes it’s as simple as designing a specific place for photo-ops and Instagram-worthy moments.

Santa Cruz del Islote is one of the world’s most fascinating communities. Learn how we put it on the map for The School of Sustainability.

Santa Cruz del Islote is a remote Colombian island just under the size of two football fields and home to around 500 residents. Situated two hours from the mainland, they don’t have access to things we take for granted like running water or electricity grids — resource conservation is simply a way of life.

Around the island, we placed lots of clickable hotspots that take a user to a story or interesting fact from an islander. We made these hotspots viewable from multiple photospheres, so a user can see them from a distance while traversing across the island. The hotspots have a 3D position, so they behave like real objects in space when the user walks from sphere to sphere.

As well as the clickable hotspots, we placed audio sources with atmospheric sounds in the 3D space. These sounds were recorded directly from the island and can be heard from multiple photospheres. The spatial audio helps the viewer to locate where the sound may be coming from. As the user comes closer or pass by it, audio intensity and panning changes, based on the distance to the audio source and the view direction of the user.

Furthermore, a completely custom sky was created, with animations of frigate birds passing over. This required us to manually cut out the sky from every photograph which was quite a labour intensive method.

Finally, we added a layer of lens flare and a subtle vignette effect, just to really help ensure a smooth transition and make the different photospheres as similar looking as possible.

The 3D Map

For the map and the overview of the island you see during the intro sequence of the website, we used a simplified version of the high poly mesh from the photogrammetry, again using Reality Capture.

Because all photospheres are positioned in 3D, we could easily create near-seamless transitions between this overview and the photospheres. Hopefully, this gives the user an even better understanding of their position on the island, and strengthens the illusion of walking around in an immersive environment.

Being able to explore a real-life location you might never see is one of the gifts recent technology has given us.

Remember when Google Street View first came out and it was a treasure to hover over Manhattan? Then came along Canadian artist Jon Rafman’s incredible Nine Eyes project capturing real-life scenes across the globe and GeoGuessr taking us from the outback of Australia to the fjords of Norway. Humans love exploring, and by mapping Santa Cruz del Islote, we hope that we have created a more immersive street view experience that everyone wants to pay a virtual visit to.

Explore The School of Sustainability for yourself.

This article originally appeared on Digital Arts Online on May 29, 2018.

Santa Cruz del Islote is a remote Colombian island just under the size of two football fields and home to around 500 residents. Situated two hours from the mainland, they don’t have access to things we take for granted like running water or electricity grids — resource conservation is simply a way of life.

All this makes the tiny island an interesting place to explore, which is why Colombia’s most sustainable bank, Bancolombia, decided to use it as their base for The School of Sustainability.

Developed as a Google Street View-like experience, virtual visitors can explore the island in detail, get to know the community, and learn nine core lessons in sustainability and resource conservation.

Together with fellow crafters and makers Google and SanchoBBDO, our goal was to create an immersive, cohesive island experience utilizing emerging tech that hadn’t been done to this level of detail before, while also making sure that people left their virtual tour with a new appreciation for resource conservation and living a more sustainable lifestyle. So how was the experience created?

Capturing the Island in Stunning Detail

We travelled to the island with a full film crew. Armed with a tripod and SLR, our photographer focused on capturing the island with beautiful shots from every angle. These shots would then go into 140 photospheres placed around the island, with each giving the viewer a high fidelity 360 degree view.

Each shot was carefully framed to ensure that there was a snapshot of island life in each photosphere, with the idea to offer a virtual tour through the lives of the residents.

Creating a More Immersive Street View Experience

While it was up to our photographer to capture island life in beautiful photos, we also had to make sure that the transition between each shot was as seamless (and similar) as possible, in order for the user to feel they are actually walking around the island and not just moving between a series of images.

And to create a cohesive transition between each photosphere, we used a variety of tricks to ‘glue’ them together.

Photogrammetry

To get a fluid transition, we needed a (low poly) 3D mesh of the island, so we could project the current photosphere on this mesh at the start of a transition, and then fade the projection to a projection of the destination photosphere while moving in 3D.

This is similar to what Google does for their own Street View. Google creates the low poly mesh needed by using a 3D scanner placed at the same location as the camera. Because we used a traditional camera to create the photospheres and couldn’t use a 3D scanner, we had to make the 3D model in a different way.

Photogrammetry was the technique we used to map the island in 3D. At heart, photogrammetry is a transformative tech technique of automatically creating a 3D model of an object, by analyzing photos of the object taken from several angles.

We used a drone for aerial photography and shot thousands of photos at ground level and then created the high poly 3D mesh we needed with photogrammetry-software called Reality Capture.

In the end, we optimized this mesh by hand. The resulting low poly mesh is used for the transitions between the different photospheres.

Imitating Real Life

The photosphere-to-mesh projection during transitions really helps in getting a more immersive experience. It gives the photospheres a 3D position in world space, and the warping of the photospheres during a transition (based on the projection on the low poly mesh) helps to give the user the feeling that they are moving through a 3D environment.

To create an even more immersive experience, we added elements to the scene that are stable and consistent between each photosphere — helping the viewer experience a more coherent transition as they explore the island.

MediaMonks Games unlocked its own achievement this November, as the most playful proposition in the global creative production company celebrated turning ten.

During this time the industry has gone through its own transformation. From Flash bursting onto the scene, to the rise of mobile and gaming for the masses, it’s been a decade packed full of developments.

Flash Back

The games industry looked a lot different pre-2006. There was very little advertising and branded games weren’t that common. Early attempts weren’t always on point. Two in particular spring to mind — Pepsiman, which was so out-of-the-box that it wasn’t comparable to anything out there.

The second is Crazy Taxi, which paved the way with high production value and included some sublimely subtle branding. Around 2006 Flash came into play, which opened up both opportunities for branded games and helped the industry grow as a whole. Along with Flash came the opportunity to make games for more web browsers, and because games were now available on more web browsers, it opened up a whole new audience for the industry.

Typical of the Flash era were games like Dofus and Habbo Hotel. Overall it became far easier to both make and play branded games. And because more audiences could be reached, the interest in branded games from advertisers grew.

iPhone Changes the Game

A few years after Flash came another game changer — the iPhone 3G. By offering licenses for $99 (instead of thousands) the games platform was suddenly affordable. The iPhone proved to be a liberator for games, as developers — who were no longer at the mercy of a select few platforms — could themselves create games for the app store. I consider it to be the industry’s Braveheart moment. With affordable licenses came clamorous cries of freedom.

Entertainment developers switched their focus to making games for mobile devices, whilst the advertising industry focused on targeting mobile phone users. The advertising and entertainment industries suddenly found themselves together on the same platform and both industries had to compete for consumers’ time. In those days, I think the advertising industry was lagging a bit behind the entertainment industry in understanding what motivates people to play games. Back then we prioritised the message over the fun and, as Candy Crush emphatically showed, it didn’t work. No matter how many brands made variations of Candy Crush, none were ever half as popular or successful as the entertainment version.

For us in the industry it became clear we had to think about games in a different way. We needed to think how we could make amazing games that were appealing, yet still incorporated branding.

From Niche to the Masses

Around 2011 — as iPhones became synonymous with cool — there was also a cultural shift in how game players were perceived. Gamers were no longer seen as nerds; gaming was now the norm. Within a relatively short period there was now the audience and cultural perception that made games a primary medium for brands to interact with consumers. From there, the industry started thinking about how games could be integrated into other mediums and experiences.

We moved from the likes of Pepsiman and co. to producing quality branded games. It was clear to see how far the industry had evolved. At MediaMonks Games, we produced Macy’s Wish Writer which sums up the progress perfectly. Within the app we merged research, tradition, and technology, packed it with mini-games, narrative and activities, all with seamlessly integrated branding.

Here’s a look at a few examples from our 2016 Games Reel–

In the wider industry, games like Pokemon and LEGO Star Wars were flawlessly designed to bring consumers into contact with both the brand and the product. Advertisers had perfected the art of reaching consumers via games.

Golden Times Ahead

It used to be that as a games developer you either wanted to be associated with Hollywood AAA or Indie groups. Over the last few years we’ve seen the rise of a third group; the branded game developer. They are perhaps less vocal, but they’re now more relevant than ever. And importantly, they’ve produced some brilliant games.

Right now advertising games are more creative and immersive. Developers and creatives haven’t been tied down by the limitations of only being able to produce games for consoles. I think you can really see that in some refreshingly creative games for mediums like AR/VR (check out the VR game Accounting). The creative progress in advertising has definitely been noticed by the entertainment industry too. Giants like Sony, who have traditionally been console-only, are now branching out into other mediums like streaming services to compete creatively.

What this means for the future only time will tell. It’s been a great ten years and it’s a great time to be involved in the industry. Whatever happens, I have no doubt the new platforms, creativity, content and battle for people’s attention will only make better games. And in my opinion, it’s only a win-win for consumers!

This article was originally posted on HuffPost on September 12, 2016.