Hill Holliday produces over 100 unique in-store printed advertisements for Dunkin Donuts each month. These are things like register toppers, window signage, drive through extenders or those folded tent cards at each table. The industry lingo for this is POP, or point of purchase advertising. Next time you are waiting in line at Dunks just look around and admire how much print material surrounds you. A lot of money and effort is spent designing, reviewing and organizing all of this POP for various campaigns across a variety of national and regional markets to ensure that each piece of collateral is driving sales.

Our account team felt that our current review process wasn’t working effectively. Awkwardly shuffling through printouts hung up in a conference room just didn’t provide a feel for how all the POP would come together in an actual store. Sometimes issues were only revealed once everything was printed, distributed and displayed at all 65 thousand locations. As soon as a campaign could be viewed collectively in the context of an actual store, problems of illogical placement, redundant color or message repetition became apparent. But at that point, it was often too late.

To solve this issue and to generally evolve our process of reviewing POP I was challenged to build a VR app that would allow our internal teams and our clients to review print ads within a virtual full-scale Dunkin Donuts store.

A full interior and exterior scene were modeled using a combination of pre-made and custom-built assets to accurately render a typical Dunkin franchise. I assembled all of these assets in Maya where they were optimized, UV mapped and then imported into Unity where materials, lighting, and interaction were added. A lightweight CMS was built allowing our studio teams to directly upload print assets which could be loaded into the app and swapped out in real-time by the user. An additional layer of physical interactions was also added though admittedly more for the amusement and education of the developer than anything else.

A full demo video of the project is available here.