Spark, New Zealand's leading telco, stands to lead the next era of technology. But the market is noisy and the messages are functional - being the loudest in the category won’t win them the war. So, when 5G arrived in New Zealand, they needed to give people a reason to care about it - to show the effect it could have, not just what it is or how fast you can stream Netflix on the bus. Instead of simply talking about it, the brief was to demonstrate the potential of 5G, and show how it will help us create in unimaginable ways.

To test the limits of their new 5G network, Spark demonstrated its potential for creativity by developing the Spark 5G Street Museum - an immersive AR experience that allowed people to explore some of the biggest and most influential creative thinkers, innovators and artists of New Zealand. Only accessed via special build OOH in physical locations where 5G is available, the 5G Street Museum consists of five immersive AR exhibits co-created with Parris Goebel, Benee, TEEKS, Askew One & David Dallas, and brought their untold stories to life with cutting-edge augmented reality.

Spark believes that each generation of technology creates a cultural change of behaviour and ambition, giving New Zealand the chance to leap forward with new ways to win big in a digital world. 3G saw the birth of instant text and calls to help the nation connect, 4G gave us richer media and provided the nation with a platform to express themselves, 5G will help us create in unimaginable ways.

Our ambition is to position Spark 5G as the network for creativity. Creativity isn’t just about art; it’s doing new things, solving unsolved problems. We have the opportunity to use 5G technology as the canvas for making the impossible possible for different cultures across the city, and help to define the new horizon of impossibilities for creativity and technology to solve.

5G Street Museum targeted urban Gen Zers in the streets where they frequent, where they overlapped with 5G zones.

Each immersive experience is different to the next, and visually stunning. They can be accessed exclusively via the 5G Street Museum app in 5G areas.

The app is built in Unity, using Unity's ARFoundation layered over iOS's ARKit and Android's ARCore for multi-platform deployment. 3D content (models, animation, motion capture data) was prepped outside of Unity by 3D artists, in a variety of forms, from a variety of sources, then brought into the engine by developers. We made heavy use of the URP scriptable render pipeline, which allowed us to switch rendering features in and out for each experience.

The team really pushed the size and complexity of the experiences; significant optimisation was required to make sure every experience performed smoothly on a variety of devices, while still achieving the ambitions of the client and artists - all of which was made possible by the speed of the 5G network.

A key objective was to grow Spark’s position as the telco associated with leading the way for 5G, by a minimum of 5 points. To date, Spark has a 10-point lead against the nearest competitor.

On average, users spent 6 minutes 24 seconds on the app (3 times the average on-app dwell time). The app also generated returning visits, with an average of 1.7 sessions per user.

The 5G Street Museum set a branding score of 77 (11 points above telco norms, and the highest Spark brand score in 36 months).

The experience successfully cut-through with a younger audience, and was 15 points higher than an older audience (35 and 20 points, respectively). The campaign also over-indexed in cultural relevance (8 points above benchmark) and brand fit (13 points above benchmark).

Due to the positive attention, the Auckland Museum partnered with Spark for a month-long 5G Street Museum activation.