• by Colin Kirkland , Staff Writer, November 25, 2024

It's not easy to breathe new life into a product that has been around for over a decade.

Children's entertainment company Spin Master wanted to showcase one of its top-selling toys, Kinetic Sand, in a way it never had before.

By leveraging CGI and virtual production methods, the toy manufacturer took a step out of its comfort zone in order to mirror the immediate, visceral experience of creativity that the product offers kids.

To do so, Spin Master teamed up with creative production company Buoy Studio, which uses innovative creative technologies to produce ad concepts “in service of the experience,” according to founder Fredrik Frizell.

Buoy started out building Web3 experiences in Decentraland for major brands like Samsung and Coca Cola, then, last year, received notoriety for creating an immersive gaming experience in Roblox for Fidelity, which garnered 14 million game plays and zero media spend in the first two weeks.

Spin Master approached Buoy with a concept for three distinct ad spots focused on showcasing the imaginary worlds children inhabit when playing with Kinetic Sand, a gloopy, cascading molding toy.

“We had a small budget and a short timeline and we tried to come up with a way to deliver the sense of how the sand actually feels, and not just from a production value standpoint,” says Frizell.

“When kids put their hands in the sand, everything becomes imaginary,” says Erica Green, Spin Master's vice president of creative. “So what we rally the campaign around is ‘When creativity feels this good, you never know what can take shape.’”

Green says Buoy's creation represents one of the first times that Spin Master has visually demonstrated the brand promise of creativity feeling good.

This would not have been possible without Unreal Engine, the Epic Games-owned 3D graphic tool and game engine that creates interactive environments for games and films – most famously, Jon Favreau's “Star Wars” Disney series, “The Mandalorian.”

Frizell says his team positioned child actors playing with the Kinetic Sand in front of a massive LED screen on which Buoy was able to use Unreal Engine to project 3D backgrounds, encapsulating ever-changing galactic and rainbow worlds.

When asked why Unreal Engine was an advantageous tool for bringing the campaign to life, Frizell told MediaPost that it accelerates production, offering he and his team the ability to generate and update different locations for various ad spots in real-time.

This makes it possible to be in different places -- a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen -- all in one shoot.

Although it is a cutting-edge technology used on big-budget Hollywood film projects, Frizell says that using Unreal Engine for ad creation can actually prove more cost efficient than shooting live action ad spots with traditional methods. The graphic tool offers an enhanced sense of freedom and speed with which smaller production teams can work.

In addition, by being able to alter and transform footage during a shoot, the technology allows brands to generate different versions of an ad spot in terms of length and animation, effectively letting teams “create an infinite amount of content if they wanted to,” Frizell adds

Spin Master’s parent-targeted Kinetic Sand campaign is a big step forward for the toy industry, says Green.

“A lot of kid-targeted TV spots are pretty demonstrative,” Green says. “I think this campaign elevates the industry to a new place. We’re targeting parents to try and show the tactile benefits of the product in a fresh, innovative way.”

The ad spots will run across social platforms in the U.S. and Canada.