Google Ads - AR Campaign

Google needed to stop SMBs from abandoning their ad spend. When customers saw a dip in ad performance, they'd switch off — often before making the simple adjustments that would've turned things around. The ask was a direct mail campaign that would educate customers on keeping their campaigns effective.

The brief started as "send them a gift." We came back with something more interesting: an AR experience delivered entirely through a web browser, no app store involved. Customers could point their phone at a physical mailer and watch a rocket launch — while learning what to do with their Google Ads along the way. Getting it to work across the range of devices people actually own was the real challenge. WebXR wasn't where it is today, so we had to find a path that was both technically reliable and genuinely easy to share.

We wanted a rocket that felt like a toy — something that triggered a bit of nostalgia rather than a tech demo. Three routes were developed, each pulling from a different visual direction. The polygon style won out. It had the right amount of charm, and as a bonus, the low surface count meant snappier performance on mid-range phones. Practical and characterful.

We moved into AR prototyping early — better to find out quickly whether scale, tracking, and responsiveness actually worked than to discover problems later. The iteration loop between creative and dev was tight throughout.