By Mark Healy // Design by Lucy Quintanilla
Everything Optimist’s Nils Arend knows about making memorable brand experiences—for companies like Nike, Beats, and Louis Vuitton—he learned throwing raves in abandoned German buildings. Here he explains how to create moments to remember.
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photograph courtesy of optimist
Name: Nils Arend
Role: Chief Experience Officer, Optimist, where he “leads a team that composes and orchestrates the creation of tangible experiences that transcend expectation.”
Age: 38
Point of Origin: Born in Germany but lived in France, Africa, and elsewhere growing up.
Inflection Points: Was bartending and windsurfing in Cape Verde (off the coast of Gambia) when he met some German club pros and returned home to start throwing parties. He later worked for a Hamburg creative agence, and in his late ‘20s, found himself quite happily driving a Volvo wagon to a corner office. He realized what he needed was was more discomfort, so he moved to LA where he knew no one, took a major pay cut, and started over. Discomfort ensued. “My English was so bad,” he says, “I was afraid to answer the phone.” He met his partner, Juergen Dold in the water surfing. They created Optimist soon thereafter.
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While you were locked in the bowels of a business school library, Nils Arend was windsurfing off the coast of Senegal. When you were treading water in a sea of cubicles in a midtown office tower, he was throwing raves in abandoned German churches. When you were angling for a corner office, he was dangling a DJ from a helicopter over Miami Beach. So when your company goes looking to create an “epic brand experience”, they don’t turn to their young MBAs or trusted account managers or you. They turn to Arend, who has devoted his career to creating thrilling sensory interactions, whether he’s doing it for 10,000 club kids or a select group of high-end handbag buyers. Here are a few of the lessons the Optimist co-founder learned about how brands make memories.
Every empty space is an experience waiting to happen.
Arend left Cape Verde (and windsurfing) behind to start creating pop-up club experiences with a German group called Team 412. “We kind of established the pop-up club culture in Germany in 1999, orchestrating experiences for club-goers based on the spaces we found: we put a club in an old casino that had been empty for 70 years. We took over an abandoned church and had a DJ ride in on a white horse. We came up with ideas that were a little bit out there and unexpected.”
party: Flashpop, smoke: Visoot Uthairam / Getty Images
Deliver on your promises.
An experience Optimist created for Beats.
One of the most common hurdles Arend and his colleagues at Optimist face is the gap between expectation and reality. “Brands and agencies often have the ability to make something sound amazing in a keynote or on a piece of paper but then there’s a huge disconnect between that and what they can actually bring to life. We ideate in the realm of what’s actually possible. We say, ‘Okay, this sounds really great. Let’s imagine ourselves in this experience and imagine how it flows and what the touchpoints of our audience are. Does it feel connected and purposeful? Can we deliver a seamless experience but also something that’s magical or unexpected, or even radical?”
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The Jordan Brand jersey reveal played out on a single sound stage over ten hours in L.A. during the 2017 NBA All-Star weekend.
Keep them guessing.
Over ten hours during the 2017 NBA All-Star weekend, Optimist staged a procession of engagements for a Jordan Brand launch that included a TNT interview with Spike Lee and that wasn’t even the main event. “There was media, influencers, and consumers all on different journeys, coming through the space at different times. There was a new product reveal, a basketball game, and a Travis Scott concert to close the loop. I love the unexpected. Delivering a multi-dimensional experience where the audience has a unique experience makes the brand more credible.”
photographS courtesy of optimist
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People just want to leave with a story to tell. It’s the equivalent of going vacation and you want to experience something new and different, you want to be taken out of your comfort zone, you want to connect with people and then you want to come home and share that with your circle. It’s almost the same objective.
optimist sizzle reel
“If you are attracting a large crowd,” Arend says, “make sure sure that whatever experiences you’re creating are accessible. We’ve gone to other things and there’s a line for this, a line for that, a line to get in... It was the most negative experience.” When Arend was throwing parties with Team 412, logistics were always in the front of their minds. “We never wanted to keep anyone waiting for too long, because it was our income... We don’t want the consumers to wait, because we’ll lose their interest.”
But don’t keep them waiting.
PeopleImages / getty images
Experience = Theater
007 Elements, an immersive James Bond museum, a collaboration between Optimist and frequent Bond art director Neal Callow.
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Arend is convinced that the richest way to build connections between a brand and consumers is through story-telling. “A one-on-one, in-person engagement is like the relationship between the audience and the performer on stage. I think brand experiences are like theater and I don’t think a lot of brands deliver against that yet.” Arend tries to recreate that magical moment, when the lights dim and the curtain opens. “The right moments for the right brands.”
go deeper
Send them home with a story to tell.
The Speed Project is an ultra-relay race from Las Vegas to Santa Monica that Optimist organized in 2013.
“People just want to leave with a story to tell. It’s the equivalent of going vacation and you want to experience something new and different, you want to be taken out of your comfort zone, you want to connect with people and then you want to come home and share that with your circle. It’s almost the same objective.”
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