By Mark Tungate
As executive creative director of brand experience agency Pinch, Michael Brown designed the Amazon Port in Cannes and brought the world of Stranger Things to Broadway. We find out how he and the team at Pinch turn brands into experiential spaces.
The branded structures that pop up along the beach during the Cannes Lions Festival are all eye-catching, but none of them dominate the landscape more than the Amazon space, which hovers over the marina. This year it even had a mezzanine. It could have been daunting – in fact the interior was pleasantly quirky.
The structure was designed and built by LA-based brand experience agency Pinch and its sister production agency Salt. Executive creative director Michael Brown says he deliberately softened Amazon’s tech edges. “They don’t need to over-emphasise the technology side of what they do, so what we’re doing here is really about imagination and connecting with people.”
As Amazon has a big presence in Cannes, the decision was to keep the design light and playful, “not taking itself too seriously”. Amazon has been in Cannes for a few years now, so he’s learned how to adapt to the Riviera climate, too. “For example, we built the space in a way to maximise airflow and maintain comfort, even in the heat of Cannes.”
Born in California, Michael started out as an architect and worked for the great Daniel Libeskind in Berlin – the city that became his home, on and off, for over a decade, when he wasn’t working on projects like Libeskind’s One World Trade Center in New York.
Eventually he felt it was time to move on from Berlin – “For a Californian, the winters there are tough” – and in a sense from architecture too. “Despite what the average person may think, architecture is about 10% or 15% design. The rest of it is dealing with the authorities. There’s all the detailing you have to do around waterproofing, safety, fulfilling sound and energy norms. There are a lot of very practical things that go into creating the finished building, but are not, for a pure designer, necessarily that interesting.”
Immersive storytelling
It’s also a notoriously slow business. Now he can finish half a dozen projects a year and relishes “telling stories through spaces”. He explains: “We help companies or brands take a product, an idea or a message and turn it into something that is experienceable in person.”
It’s expanding something that may only be a single slogan or mission statement into a structure. So the audience interaction with the brand is naturally longer and richer, Michael adds. “In contrast to how most marketing is done, where you’re trying to get a message into somebody’s head in a matter of seconds, we’re building something where people might spend hours, which is a very different way of interacting with an idea or a brand.”
The working process with clients is very different too. “How do you translate brand values or one line into something tactile? Do you want to be more geometric and gridded, more rational? D’you want to use glossier surfaces? Are we going to create a matrix of light and information – so it’s going to be more screen-based?”
When brand values become tactile
It’s also a notoriously slow business. Now he can finish half a dozen projects a year and relishes “telling stories through spaces”. He explains: “We help companies or brands take a product, an idea or a message and turn it into something that is experienceable in person.”
It’s expanding something that may only be a single slogan or mission statement into a structure. So the audience interaction with the brand is naturally longer and richer, Michael adds. “In contrast to how most marketing is done, where you’re trying to get a message into somebody’s head in a matter of seconds, we’re building something where people might spend hours, which is a very different way of interacting with an idea or a brand.”
The working process with clients is very different too. “How do you translate brand values or one line into something tactile? Do you want to be more geometric and gridded, more rational? D’you want to use glossier surfaces? Are we going to create a matrix of light and information – so it’s going to be more screen-based?”
Less control, more depth
We talk about how, by its very nature, an experiential space is more difficult to measure than a digital ad from an impact perspective. “It’s hard to quantify in the ways that people are used to in digital marketing. We create spaces – it’s not like an ad where there’s an image or video and five heavily crafted words of copy.”
“Experientially, you have to let go of those reins a little bit. Except that with the experience we deliver, the messaging transfer we can do is potentially much deeper. It has a lot more touch points because you’re spending more time there, but it’s less controlled.”
You also can’t carve visitors up into demographic segments – people respond to the space as individuals. But it may be that Generation Z, who’ve grown skilled at blocking out digital messages that don’t interest them, are far happier to spend time with an analogue experience.
“I think it’s a much more generous process. If you look at the way communication has always existed, it’s between people. There’s a sharing of information that goes both ways. So I think what we’re doing is more like that two-way street, as opposed to the one-way street of advertising, where they want you to receive a specific message.”
Media turns upside down
Gen Z would certainly have responded to a recent Pinch project, which involved recreating the town of Hawkins – a name instantly familiar to fans of the Netflix show Stranger Things – in the lobby of a Broadway theatre. The challenge was that the story told on stage takes place in 1959, so the 80s vibe familiar from the series was unavailable. The solution was to recreate the creepy Creel mansion from the show, peeling away years of dilapidation and linking past to present.
The project also has a wider resonance in the experiential field. “Netflix is really expanding a lot into the experiential space. It’s funny: product companies have become media companies and media companies want analogue spaces. There’s this real mix and experiential is kind of where everybody’s meeting in the centre. They’re asking, how do we show up? How do we translate this great IP that we have into other formats?”
Experiential is certainly having “a moment”, he confirms. “You could argue that it’s a sort of correction after the pandemic. At that time everything accelerated into this remote space where everybody felt compelled to stay out of the world for a long time in a really intense way. And they came out of it realising that it didn’t satisfy all their needs. People don’t want to just respond to messages over screens in various forms.”
They want to touch things, meet people, meander and mingle. In fact, to paraphrase Pinch’s own mantra, they want to “feel something”.
Related Content:
MARKETING Magazine is not responsible for the content of external sites.