Cannes you feel it?
Your “just like being there” blow-by-blow from Pinterest Beach at Cannes Lions—from what we built to why we built it.
Earlier this year, a micro team from Pinterest Brand Creative (with the spectacular Sara Strand on design, Tamara Costa as super producer, Kevin Taylor on production design and yours truly on words) joined forces with Pinterest’s world-calibre Experiential Marketing and Business Marketing and Content Marketing teams to create a pow-fully memorable Pinterest experience at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Working hand-in-hand-in-Hangouts with UK creative agency Anyways and our stalwart production partners at One Rise East, we created three interactive spaces — Playland, Discoveryland, Dreamland — each specially designed to give visitors a way to experience, first hand, just what it is that makes Pinterest so special.
Play your way
Unlike on social media, where you post things and wait for Likes, Pinterest is more like personal media. It’s your place to try things out and muddle through until you find what you like — without worrying about what anyone else thinks.
It’s like when you’d go to the park as a kid. You didn’t worry if you were “good” at sliding. You just slid. And if you liked it, you did it 300 more times. If you didn’t, you moved on to the seesaw. That’s the unselfconscious openness that Pinterest brings people, and it’s exactly what we were hoping to recreate with Playland.
To make it happen, we reached out to UK artist and creator Yinka Ilori, who designed an eye-popping grownup playground, complete with seesaw and merry-go-round. The interactive explosion of color was inspired by the colors that were showing up most in the Pins people around the world were saving, from countries like Mexico (bright juicy orange), Japan (spring green) and Germany (neon pink) — all plucked from unique Pinterest data, courtesy of our data science team.
Discover your taste
Once people’s minds were blown wide open by their spin through Playland, they staggered over to Discoveryland for a “you inspired” drink.
If you imagine Google was a bar, the bartender would just ask what you want. But where Pinterest really shines is at those times when you don’t quite know what you want. You navigate through different options, inspired by whatever looks good to you, until you land somewhere interesting. Along the way you discover new drinks (or projects, or styles) the likes of which you’ve never heard of before, and would have never known to search for.
That’s the experience we set out to recreate for Discoveryland. Working with food artists and creators The Robin Collective, we built a sensory-driven self-discovery bar, where visitors listened to different sounds, sniffed different smells and peered at different colors through special beach-side viewfinders. Then they stamped their favorites on a specially designed Discovery card and handed it to the bartender, who whipped each person up their own personalized drink.
Dream on
Drinks in hand, people wandered over to Dreamland, where they kicked back in hammocks and gazed up at our dream installation.
It’s an interesting thing. People don’t typically come to Pinterest to create boards of things they hate. Instead, they make boards full of things they hope will happen. There are more than 4 billion boards on Pinterest. That’s 4 billion dreams for the future.
To show how people use Pinterest to plan their ideal futures, we collected the names of boards with the word “dream” in them. Boards like “Ethnologie métier de mes rêves” (“Ethnology job of my dreams”), “Ein Traum von Badeanzügen” (“A dream of bathing suits”) and “Braids, fros and dreams.” Then we turned those board names into flags, hundreds and hundreds of them. As people swayed in their hammocks, they could look up and watch the dream flags flutter in the Mediterranean sea breezes. It was a beautiful thing.
Identifying our visual identity
To tie it all together, our designer Sara created a fresh and flexible visual identity, a synergy of mustard, striped pink and polkadot green that unified the entire experience—from the heads-up posts we shared leading up to the big event, to the looping video at the end of the pier, to the scenic meeting rooms, right down to the uniforms our people wore.
It’s been a few months since Pinterest Beach came to life at Cannes, but we’re already seeing signs that our activation made a real impact with the creative and advertising community that comes to the Fest each year. More attendees than ever are looking to get their brands on Pinterest, where people are open to trying new things and dreaming about what comes next.
Looking forward to seeing what we dream up for Cannes 2020! Until next year. Au revoir! Adios! Auf wiedersehen!
