Odds are that for every revision a design-oriented advertising campaign goes through, the harried designer utters the following consolatory mantra - "It's not art; it's advertising." But as more major brands seek to engage their media-savvy demographic through new mediums, the idea of mirroring brand values through commissioned artistic interpretations is gaining momentum.

We've seen it recently with integrated print, web and broadcast campaigns (72andSunny's Zune Arts program for Microsoft). And with increasing regularity, advertisers and their agencies are moving their messages into the third dimension, with design and graphic-intensive installation work that gives companies from the broadcast and interactive realms a bigger, broader canvas to work with.

For agencies and their clients, such projects are simply another step towards effectively reaching the consumer. "Any brand that has a public forum has an opportunity to engage with people on a lot of different levels," says Keith Anderson, interactive creative director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco. Anderson and fellow GS&P CD Will McGinness collaborated with San Francisco-based immersive content developers Obscura Digital and interactive hot shop The Barbarian Group on a massive interactive display for Saturn at Wired's NextFest 2006 last fall, which nabbed a Silver Clio in May for innovative use of technology.

Designed to launch the automaker's new Green Line of hybrid vehicles, the installation incorporated holographic hosts welcoming visitors, animated projections on the vehicles, and the pièce de résistance: a 12' x 35' wall featuring giant blades of interactive grass. Utilizing a specially-developed upgrade of Processing (an open-source programming language for interactive/generative visual work), Obscura Digital and the Barbarian team, including founding partners Benjamin Palmer and San Fran-based Processing whiz Robert Hodgin, developed a camera tracking system that connected visitors' movements to the reactive blades of grass. The grass was designed in segments that followed a "variable decay" formula coded to respond to tracked movement.

Tech-heavy, yes, but emotionally stimulating too. "We wanted to do something that would be gigantic and beautiful from a distance and that would make people want to walk a couple of hundred yards across the convention floor to see it," says Palmer. "It needed to be an attractor, but also something overwhelmingly emotional."

"The thing we found really exciting about this was that we were able to think about triggering all of the senses," echoes Anderson. "How can you get people information but also entertain and build something that engages them in every possible way?"

This past April, GS&P and Obscura Digital collaborated with bicoastal creative studio Brand New School on a graphic-intensive, interactive mural for the launch of Adobe's CS3 in New York. Obscura developed another camera-tracking system that would capture and codify the movements of passers-by; only this time, their movements would trigger assorted designs and animations created by the BNS team, all with Adobe products, of course.

"The agenda was to represent the different CS3 applications in an interesting way," says BNS creative director Jonathan Notaro. With a mandate that each user had to have a different experience, BNS crafted myriad graphics and animations that would come to life through three mural bases, as well as six layers that could be randomized.

"At one point it was this crazy, loose canvas, and I think they wanted it to be a little more controlled," says Notaro. Still, he maintains BNS "had a blank slate. We wanted to represent a good variety of animation and designs - some things would be smooth and fluid, other things would be crude, like stop-motion, and others would be more filmic."

Fellow BNS CD Jens Gehlhaar says the creative freedom the company has experienced via installation work "is closer to the stuff that we've been able to do for MTV, in that you don't need to tell a story and there aren't any sell points - it just needs to look cool." He most recently oversaw a project for Microsoft Office 2007 from McCann Erickson. A hallway at New York's JFK Airport was outfitted with 40 plasma screens (20 per side) arranged in groups of five, which displayed a series of retouched stills that followed the sun. "We started in Tokyo and ended in suburban America somewhere."

Compared to working on a broadcast spot, Gehlhaar says, "The content and the creative was much more free than it would be with a spot. We were told repeatedly by the creative director that they just needed to have really seductive imagery."

Working in both the design/mograph world as well as the interactive/programming space, Agency Collective principals Lisa Prescott and Michael Jakab say they relish the opportunity to push boundaries with product installations.

The San Francisco-based creative studio did just that with a recent project for Wieden + Kennedy, Tokyo. During Tokyo Designers Week the agency curated an installation for Nike dubbed "Premium Performance" that featured assorted visual artists. AC designed an interactive "mirrored graphic world" that incorporated pieces of Nike Shox shoes into both the mograph component and the physical display itself.

After being sent pieces of the shoe to study, the team designed an exhibit where visitors were encouraged to run on an AC-designed pad, comprised of various Shox components and connected, via a software program, to an HD screen that faced the user. Movements and running speeds would then influence the graphics on the screen, comprised of what Prescott calls "abstract representations of the shoe pieces that would get more elaborate and beautiful as you ran."

Some brands are more than happy to call the work they commission for installations art and not advertising.

Sydney-based branding agency The One Centre developed what it called "a contemporary art movement" for the Australian launch of the Audi TT, which awarded a $20,000 AUD Audi Art Prize to an emerging Aussie artist, and culminated in an exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art in April. Among those participating were Japanese audio-visual whiz Tagaki Masakatsu, Melbourne-based new media troupe Eness and Sheffield-based creative studio Universal Everything. UE's Matt Pyke collaborated with Processing programmer Karsten Schmidt on an HD video showing the outline of the car through shimmering streaks of light developed by a software-based wind tunnel. Serving as both a viral to promote the show and an exhibit, it's also been featured as an outdoor projection for launches in Canada and Italy.

But on whether installation work more effectively bridges the chasm between art and commerce than, say, a 30-second spot, opinions vary. "From an agency perspective, we're always trying to do that, [especially with] interactive," says Goodby's McGinness. "I wouldn't say that installation work lends itself any more to that than anything else."

Some of the designers, however, may beg to differ.

"It does bridge the gap between consumerism and the art world," says Jakab. "You're still presenting the product but it's in a more artistic venue."

Pyke agrees: "An immersive experience is a far more tactile and memorable one than another ad on the box; we can explore the 'art' aspect because the approach is required to be more subtle and contemplative.

"It would be a turn-off to have a brand shout at you in 90-foot letters."

Agency Collective http://www.agencycollective.com
The Barbarian Group http://www.thebarbariangroup.com
Brand New School http://www.brandnewschool.com
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners http://www.gspsf.com
Obscura Digital http://www.obscuradigital.com
The One Centre http://www.theonecentre.com
Universal Everything http://www.universaleverything.com