B-Reel: The Company That's Changing Advertising
B-Reel is using technology to obliterate the line between selling and entertainment. Check out how this company is shaking up the industry.
Courtesy Pereira & O'Dell
Find Me! The actress Emmy Rossum plays a kidnapping victim in Inside, an online film that was a game that was, obliquely, a commercial for a laptop. Some 50 million people worldwide saw the campaign—and many did much more than just watch.
Michael Edwards
Collectively Brilliant Anders Wahlquist, center, with his New York employees. Individuals don't expect to get a lot of credit at B-Reel. That would be un-Swedish.
If you were to pinpoint a breakout moment for the advertising production company B-Reel, it would probably be the release of The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive film produced in 2010 with Google Creative Labs and director Chris Milk. The purpose of the film was to promote Google's nascent Chrome browser, which tech people loved but the masses weren't adopting quickly.
As with many B-Reel projects, the early users were tipped off to the film's entry point, a website, by word of mouth—by an influential blog like Gizmodo or because a "You have to check this out" link showed up in their Twitter or Facebook feed.
What ensued from there is better experienced than explained, but a simple, mostly white homepage invites you to enter your childhood address and hit Play. After some loading time, the Arcade Fire song "We Used to Wait" begins to play as a second browser window pops up to reveal a youth in a hooded sweatshirt running along a street. From there, an interactive film of sorts, with live action and a flock of animated birds, appears in a series of browser windows that pop up intermittently, seeming to dance to the music.
At a certain point it becomes clear that the boy running in one window is the same one viewed in another window from above, in a satellite image taken from Google Maps, and, as the camera zooms and rotates (in sync with the camera on the running kid in the other window), you realize that he is running in your hometown. On your street. Toward your home.
The experience was unlike any other on the Internet—in the way it animated the ugly mechanics of the platform (the dancing browser windows becoming part of the film) but more so in that it wasn't just cool, it was emotional.
The beginning of something big
The Wilderness Downtown exploded across the Internet. It was named Best of Show at the South by Southwest Interactive Awards, won the Grand Prix in the Cyber category at the Cannes Lion Awards, and was named Site of the Year by the insiders' arbiter of taste and cool, FWA (for Favourite Website Awards). "I chose it because, of all the entries, here is something that has genuinely changed the game," said one of the FWA judges, Iain Tait, then of Wieden + Kennedy. "In a few short months, it's become the most referenced piece of work that I can remember. And for good reason."
One of the most revealing things about The Wilderness Downtown was that it didn't overtly sell anything. If you just walked over and watched it on a friend's desktop, you'd think it was an art project or an unusual music video. The catch: The site was optimized for Chrome, so if you didn't have Chrome already, you were likely to download it to watch once you had heard the buzz.
The role of an advertising production company is to execute the vision of agency creatives. Historically, the primary task has been to make commercials, but since the dawn of the Internet as a medium for advertising, some production companies have chosen to specialize in that side of things, in websites and digital films, and—increasingly, especially in the case of B-Reel—to merge these mediums and others into interactive experiences that are more entertainment than advertising.
B-Reel's reputation is now such that it really isn't surprising when a prospective client knocks on the door and says, "We want something that's never been done before and that is going to make our brand the coolest thing on Earth."
Mitsubishi Live Drive
Working with a robotics expert, B-Reel kitted out a Mitsubishi Outlander Sport with robotic controls, so that visitors to the project's website could "drive" the car around a California pier, using keyboard controls.
"Literally, that is the brief sometimes," says Anders Wahlquist, a tall, blond, extremely thin man who is the CEO and one of the three Swedish founders of the company, born in Stockholm but now also operating in London, Los Angeles, and New York, the de facto headquarters.
What Wahlquist tells such clients is that they have come to the right place.
It is rare these days that B-Reel's three founders are in the same city at the same time. Generally speaking, Petter Westlund, the company's chief creative officer, is in Stockholm; Pelle Nilsson is in Los Angeles, focusing on B-Reel's infiltration of the entertainment world through B-Reel Films; and Wahlquist is based in New York.
Finding a new direction
The three men founded B-Reel in 1999 as an advertising/marketing production shop and did, according to Nilsson, "everything you could do within the media and advertising," including traditional ads, TV programming, and digital signage. Sweden was early to adopt the Internet and especially broadband, and as soon as the Web was ready for it, B-Reel was producing content—taking things its people knew, like film and motion graphics, and applying them to this emergent platform.
As early as 2000, B-Reel had created a youth channel for the cell-phone maker Ericsson that aired concerts and band interviews live online. Mostly, however, the founders' ambitions outstripped the available technology—and that, as much as anything, explains the hacker mentality that is probably B-Reel's defining quality. "Limitations are frustrating, but they can also trigger a really creative side in you," says Westlund.
