Inside Wieden+Kennedy’s amusingly garish ‘NOT 4 $ALE’ storefront in Cannes
Creative director Adam Rix on creating “a haven of creativity and stupidity” on the otherwise flashy Croisette.
Fransebas
The Croisette in Cannes is known for its eminently upscale string of luxury stores stretching from the Palais down to the Hotel Martinez. But this week, during Cannes Lions, a decidedly downmarket interloper has set up shop right in the middle of the strip—courtesy of Wieden+Kennedy.
The agency rented a storefront, named it “NOT 4 $ALE” and festooned it, inside and out, with the kind of garish messaging you’d typically find on pawn shops and “we buy gold”-type stores.
Its intentionally weird, sloppy and kitschy visuals are a stark counterpoint not only to the aesthetics of its neighbors (which include everything from Dolce & Gabbana to a shop that literally sells luxury clothes for dogs) but to all the exquisitely crafted advertising on display a few hundred yards down at the Palais. (It’s doubly ironic since W+K picked up two Grand Prix on Tuesday, in Entertainment and Gaming, for its Clash of Clans “Clash From the Past” campaign, which was a masterpiece of craft.)
W+K is using the storefront primarily as a meeting space—we had a chat with the agency’s McDonald’s client there ourselves—but they’re also doing some programming, including a session at 10 a.m. Thursday with W+K’s Karl Lieberman and Brandon Henderson and Springhill Company’s Ricardo Viramontes discussing how to find a young unique creative voice and POV.
In one corner of the shop, W+K prints goofy slogans and outlandish images on upcycled clothing and other items—such as the Cheil-sponsored Cannes bag that everyone got upon checking in, which had nothing in it and honestly just seemed very wasteful.
The store’s design is courtesy of NOT Wieden+Kennedy, a standalone branding and design studio that launched in London at the beginning of this year. We spoke with Adam Rix, the creative director who runs NOT W+K, about just WTF he and the team were thinking.
Ad Age: Where did this concept come from?
Adam Rix: Dan Wieden, when trying to express the point of everything we do, said “Move me, dude.” Those three words that drive everything we do at NOT W+K—and our approach to NOT 4 $ALE. But standing out and moving people isn’t so easy when the most creative companies on the planet are all within a square mile of one another. So at a festival that celebrates the most sophisticated ways of selling on the planet, we decided to build a space that celebrated the crudest.
Is the idea to poke a little fun at the industry at an event that’s so grand and fancy?
The space is primarily all about being ourselves, having fun—and inviting anyone in the industry to come in and join us. “Fun” is an overused, sometimes sickly word. But this is a festival of creativity, by the seaside, in 30-degree Celsius sunshine—and we wanted our space to be the embodiment of that.
We’re not poking fun at our competitors. Maybe the seriousness of the industry to some extent, but we are the industry just as much as anyone else. There are serious talks going on, serious awards up for grabs and lots of other serious things. NOT 4 $ALE should be the lighthearted counterpoint. A place where you can do something as simple as print something funny onto your Cannes tote bag. Or take a pee through a lion toilet seat. The perfect pick-me-up after winning that Bronze where all you’d hoped and dreamed of was a Gold.
Can you talk about some of the design choices—the exterior, the walls inside, etc.?
We wanted to be a haven of creativity and stupidity—but that’s not as easy as it sounds. We inherited a storefront on the swankiest boulevard in Cannes, amongst luxury brands known for taking these kinds of vernacular aesthetics and elevating them to high fashion.
So on a strip where you can’t buy a pair of socks for less than $1,000, the most important thing was staying true to the original idea and not allow ourselves to craft the design beyond what a basic shop might do. If there was any debate along the way, it tended to be, “Is the design shit enough?” At one point our artworker kerned all of the typography on the storefront and made it all perfectly consistent. We asked him to change it back. Things like this caused much confusion throughout.
Our approach to copy came from the same place—“How would a shop like this sell a podcast?”—and using superlatives and hyperbole to oversell very basic things. The rule was, “Does it make us laugh?” There wasn’t much more to it than that.
And the same goes for the walls—we tell people it’s the “Bayeux Tapestry of Cannes” to make them think really hard. But really it’s a random selection of random items you’d find in a shop, things you’d find in Cannes, and a few cues from the corporate world.
There’s a rumor that the lion toilet seat was prototyped with a world-famous industrial designer over many months, but the truth is we just bought it on Amazon.
