It was a hundred years ago, more or less, that Robert Edmond Jones observed that in the combination of the live actor and the moving picture, a whole new form is born. How often I have mused at how prescient that statement was. Jones clearly had thought of the evidence at hand… Moving pictures could connect to the human sensorium at levels that could make us laugh, or cry, or even run on cue. The surprised audience to August and Louis Lumiere’s infamous film of a train approaching certainly felt inspired to get up and run by the fidelity of immersive experience they had yet to experience ever before. That was 1896.
Now, we begin to see the full fruition of the mediums of the real and the virtual. What the Lumiere brothers first experimented with, the potential that Jones saw in combining that in a staged space with real humans, now comes full circle with the palette of merged realities now available to us, as well as with the total removal of barrier between the audience and the experience.
I have had the good fortune to sit in a room while Rama Allen, executive creative director of The Mill, pitches creative ideas. His is a questing mind; it doesn’t really have a box that one needs to get outside of; he’s already a hundred steps out front and finding patterns that make your brain itch in compelling ways. Rama also has an uncanny ability to make you feel what he’s describing. He’s a fantastic communicator. I watch what’s going on at The Mill with avid interest. Ponder for a moment that The Mill has steadily expanded and invented itself beyond its original form as an FX shop for feature films. When life has assumed the production values of feature film, we all need an FX shop.
With equal avidity, I regularly check in with the latest happenings at Wieden + Kennedy. W+K is that rare thing these days: an agency that remains independent of the large groups or management consultant conglomerates. It’s given W+K a tangible advantage over time, and now more than ever, it feels like they knew all along what the future would demand. Nimble minds, new forms, ad hoc teams of the best collaborators for that project, consistently delivering mind-blowing communication and experience for their clients, all unconstrained by a regimented need to conform to a larger form.
W+K have also been at the vanguard of understanding that marketing communications have burst out of the rectangle, and through the idea of phenomena and observer, immersion is the key now, placemaking, activated storytelling. Today’s consumer wants to be part of unique and exciting experiences, which they can seamlessly re-write into their own narrative through rich social media sharing.
It was natural then that W+K and The Mill paired up to create an experience for Corona in Mexico City that blurred the lines between real and virtual, between dreams and reality, between urban and paradise.
“The inspiration for this project was to alleviate a tension for and that required us to go beyond traditional advertising,” says Thiago Zanettini, Global VP of Corona. “We leveraged cutting-edge technology in a meaningful way to bring to life the brand’s purpose.
"Corona is on a mission to encourage people around the world to reconnect with nature and the outside," he continues. "Corona believes outside is where our best side shines through, but getting outside to experience nature isn’t as easy as it should be, with over half the world’s population currently living in urban areas.”
With that remit, Corona decided to create a secret paradise which combined theatrical performance, environmental design, VR, and interactive engagement to enable attendees to experience paradise and inspire them to seek nature afterward.
Beginning with a glowing Corona vending machine, a magic portal opens, inviting. You proceed, guided by a whimsical dancer clad to represent a high-style hummingbird. The experience then unfolds through the grandly decrepit ruins of Mexico City’s Gral Prima, artfully recast by the geniuses at Cocolab into lush and magical environments. Once inside, participants don wearable VR rigs, and now wander a mixed reality that combines physical effects of wind, heat, light, and water, with virtual fantasy layers that provide a journey through four incredible and reactive environments, each its own take on paradise. The sum of this physical installation and the virtual layers is the recipe for a new theater, a new storyspace, a new shared experience. And make no mistake, this kind of adoption of life as theater, of every civic space an activated space, is only just beginning.
There’s magic here. There’s a genuine connective experience. There’s also a commercial calculus. Marketing is about achieving quantity of quality touchpoints. While the underlying creative and purpose makes for a compelling “what,” the success would literally be measured in the metrics of sharing, which is really, the “why.” It’s been my experience in creating similar experiences that the creative balance sheet needs to enable powerful shared story telling in person and in the extended media sharing. Corona succeeds in spreading the sentiment of the piece by creating a space and an experience that would spread through the Instagram stories, the Facebook albums, and the YouTube influencers. By those metrics, success was found.
Thirty-two media partners joined to provide a wide audience. Over 3,500 influencers were invited to the experience, ultimately creating over a million views, and well over a hundred million impressions. By that measure, this manner of installation enjoys as much cultural impact as a feature film or a Broadway smash. Sit with that for a moment.
As with all the stories I have shared here under this banner, the Paraiso Secreto reveals to us whole new forms of storytelling. Whole new forms of marketplace for creative services. And whole new sectors for technology vendors to address.
I urge you to check out the behind the scenes video below and find yet more detail about the project here.
Bob Bonniol is a director and production designer known for his implementation of extensive media and interactive features in his productions. Currently, he is the creative director for the massive renovation of The Core at General Motors' World Headquarters in Detroit. The installation features the largest permanent interactively driven LED screen array on earth. In 2016, he was production designer for the Star Wars Celebration segment of ABC’s Disneyland 60th Anniversary Special, working closely with Lucasfilm, Disney Music Group, and director Amy Tinkham.
Other clients have included Marvel Studios, The Walt Disney Company, Live Nation, AEG, Feld Entertainment, Chrysler Corporation, Activision/Blizzard, America's Got Talent, X-Factor, American Idol, Blue Man Group, Microsoft, Nokia as well as countless recording artists, Broadway producers, opera companies, theme parks, cruise lines, dance companies, and architects.