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LAUNCHING TWO VW VEHICLES AT SELFRIDGES
Think about how many visitors, to the West End, must pass Selfridges department store, Oxford Street , in London . (Around 9,000 an hour!) Think about how much publicity a fashionable, lifestyle store can draw – especially if it endorses and exhibits the work of authentic video artists / directors, not to mention one of the films featuring popular actress, Minnie Driver.
The brief for this project went something like this… “Launch 2 very different cars through Selfridges windows, connecting Selfridges merchandise, and therefore customer, with the VW vehicles / their target customer. Do not put a real car in any window and utilize video playback in most displays.” A superb producer would take care of commissioning and editing the independently-made videos whilst we needed to provide the monitors etc., to play footage on a loop.
One of the cars was a 4x4, the Tourag; with a wide appeal, from mums on school runs, to city slickers and rural explorers. The other, the Phaeton was a luxurious, bespoke-finished, sedan in the league of a Jaguar or Bentley. Helping inspire the direction for these windows, VW and their advertising agency provided much copywriting, photography and diagrams which I felt important to incorporate. Each window became a reflection of the car's character, their sleek lines, the interior finishes; and included text, quoted from their website.
The key to making the most of a window space (as opposed to a similar-sized billboard) is utilizing depth and layers. Most department store windows are around 3m in depth and the glass itself is a vitally important ‘layer'. Using graphics or framing devices on the glass is also important to treating the space as a ‘box' where one invites an observer to focus in a rather narrow, obvious direction. But there is no reason why this ‘frame', which often obscures a substantial amount of what is behind the glass, cannot hold information or visuals.
The success of this launch and of our visual communication of VW's brief was, the amount of information given by the client. Flying us to Dresden to view the Glass Factory where the high-end, Phaeton was assembled on the most pristine production line was like watching a theatrical performance. This incredible, museum-meets-Mecca piece of marketing was also to be somehow conveyed in one of the largest windows at Selfridges. Being inspired by leather and wood-veneer samples and glossy metallic colours in an architectural ‘temple' was integral to arriving at design solutions which would work at Selfridges.
This chapter would then elaborate on the designs, marrying car parts with Selfridges' stock, how stock was selected to further portray the target customer's lifestyle. Using traditional, theatre-set displays next to robotic scanners, X-raying the car's engine, about half of the windows (16 in total) featured plasma screens framed abstractly by close-up photography of rear view mirrors. We also used anti-right-angled lines to draw the eye and reflect the vehicles' designs and used high spec finishes to further interpret the brand's values. The client was able to provide numerous car parts, adding exhibition status to the likes of an exhaust pipe. |
