 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
Pittsburgh design firm creates electronics pavilion for Summer Olympics
Wednesday, September 06, 2000 By Deborah Mendenhall, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
When the world gathers next week in Sydney, Australia, a little-known Pittsburgh marketing firm with big ideas is hoping to wow 'em with the unexpected.
For the past several months, North Side-based elan communications has been creating Samsung Electronics' multimillion-dollar pavilion, Olympic Rendezvous @Samsung.
The facility, sponsored by the electronics giant and assembled around an existing three-story parking garage, is designed in two parts. One side will display Samsung products, and the other will house the official athlete hospitality center, where Olympians can meet with their families, who are not allowed in Olympic Village.
While tremendously exciting, the project presented more than its share of challenges, said Mickey McManus, elan's senior vice president of creative vision and strategy. For instance, who travels to the Olympic Games to look at television sets and telephones?
"This one pushed our brains a little," he said. "We turned [the pavilion] into a bit of an experience."
Using lights, sounds, projected images, creative displays and performers who swoop from the sky, elan created a kind of technology theme park with a message.
Think of it as Disney World fired up to sell electronics.
"It's experiential marketing," McManus said. "Through design, structure and technology, we are creating an experience people will remember. It's taking all the tenets we learned as designers and weaving them together to create an experience where all the senses are active."
To fully understand the concept, McManus points to how it was employed.
The challenge: creatively present Samsung's wireless telephones.
The solution: bubbles.
"When you think about it, communication is going on all around us," McManus said. "Conversations are floating above our heads. And with the right instrument, you can pluck it right out the air. It's that easy."
Bubbles, made of silver-colored nylon and bearing bar codes, float around the pavilion.
When snatched out of the air and placed under a scanner, the balloon's bar code will trigger a question about the Olympics on a computer monitor. A correct answer will win a prize, such as a T-shirt.
The challenge: convey Samsung's invitation that everyone is welcome to communicate.
The solution: the Cell Phone Garden.
Telephones on waist-high stalks sway back and forth in the breeze and greet passers-by in different languages.
The challenge: convey the message that technology is all around us.
The solution: the Technology Tunnel, where visitors are surrounded by monitors that flash a multitude of visual effects and images.
Those experiences, while titillating by themselves, lead to the climax of the exhibit.
Three stories above visitors' heads, in an atrium at the heart of the parking garage, about a dozen circus performers on flying rigs put on an air show, sweeping down and interacting with images that have been projected on the wall.
Set to energetic music and dramatic lighting, "Digital Interlude" is a series of performances produced by Dreamcast, the creators of Cirque Noveaux.
"Performances happen above [visitors] and around them, and that becomes the finale, and the culmination of an exciting experience," McManus said. "Then we cut to black."
It's all wrapped in a structure of steel masts and fabric sails that appear to billow in the wind. Sydney is a waterfront town, and Samsung wanted to mimic sail boats bobbing in the harbor and the Sydney Opera House with its beautiful, cupped sail shapes.
Much of the construction was completed by elan's parent company, Exhibitgroup/Giltspur, a design, event services and marketing company in New York.
Samsung invited elan to submit ideas for the pavilion after the chairman heard McManus deliver a seminar in Korea on experiential marketing.
McManus calls elan one of Pittsburgh's best-kept secrets, and noted it doesn't have many clients in the city.
But the company is known elsewhere and has a string of big-name clients, such as Nortel, Bristol Myers Squibb, Schering-Plough and Janssen Pharmaceutica.
|
||||||||||||
