Interactive and Experiential Design Abound in Best Creative Ad Campaigns

Interactive and experiential design clearly dominate AdAge’s Creativity Magazine’s just released of the top ten best creative campaigns of 2010. This speaks volumes about the future of design and makes us rub our hands together in delight, since we’re all about interactive and experiential design.

In case you can’t remember all these experiential design beauties and others (that happens this time of year), the campaigns identified by Creativity Magazine as the cream of the crop featured this great body of work:

The Old Spice campaign, which was not only brilliant, but relied on consumer generated video and social media to hit it out of the park–interactive experiential design at it’s most basic level;

The Pepsi Refresh campaign, which again relied on social to support its cause-focused effort;

Domino’s Pizza, which relied on consumer input and social media channels to help improve its brand and turn the corner following a disastrous event;

Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco and their tremendous online effort that included leveraging Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, web craziness and some traditional advertising to focus eyeballs on the star’s return to TV on a different station.

Space Chimp, the World Wildlife Fund Australia’s compelling environmental message , produced in collaboration with musician Ben Lee;

Nike’s experiential design campaign for the World Cup, which included user-generated content integrated into the digital outdoor production, interactive film and a healthy dose of social media to spur awareness and participation;

Jay-Z’s promotion of his new book, “Decoded,” that was again an interactive, experiential design piece, literally bringing the book to life for fans in a myriad of different locations. This campaign produced by Droga5, also included an online element sponsored by Bing, that allowed fans who couldn’t physically participate in the outdoor extravaganzas the chance to do so online.

Mitsubishi’s virtual test drive harnessed technology for their Live Drive, the first of its kind by an automaker, and an obvious nod to the experiential design decade we have entered;

Dare Labs’ Remote Palette is nothing short of brilliant in the realm of app development and its popularity was spurred along by web video and social channels.

And finally, the release of Arcade Fire’s Wilderness Downtown campaign was an example of collaborative genius that combined music video production for the band’s “We Used to Wait” song, with Google Earth and created a musical experiential design piece.

The interesting thing about all of these campaigns is that they typify the massive changes in the world of advertising that are leaning so heavily in the direction of experiential design. Notice how many include consumer-generated content and/or provide an opportunity for interactivity with consumers? And how many rely on a variety of social channels to help spread awareness. And how experiential design is being tapped again and again to allow consumers to be a part of a campaign, not just passively watch from the sidelines?

As a digital media and creative services agency, the success of these campaigns is nothing less than pure delight for us. It confirms that we made the right move in expanding our brand beyond production and post-production into the fresh (and fun) new area of experiential design. This kind of substantive transformation has not been easy these past few years – new jobs and new people replacing the old model – lots of change can be stressful for sure. So it’s nice to end the year with news like this that lets us know that we are in a good position as we start 2011. Here’s wishing all of us in this battered industry a prosperous new year!