Barcelona Producció supports and funds young and emergent artists. They organise cycles of expositions every year and have become a platform that opened up careers for artists like Equipo Palomar and Antoni Hervas.
With the current advancement in technology digital communication has become accessible to everyone, creating a community of people and a new language online. Today, it is through digital media that we encounter information and connect ourselves to brands, even more so when their communication and content speaks to us on a personal level. Interpreting the artist as a brand with an online community of its own, the figure of the artist has changed alongside the society he or she lives in. The artist is no longer an elevated genius, but has instead been humanised into a person with a daily life and a phone to film it. For Barcelona Producció, an initiative within the framework of exposition hall La Capella, ICUB and Ajuntament de Barcelona, we translated this shift into a campaign.
Focussing mostly on printed matter in prior campaigns, information on exhibitions and performances at La Capella wasn’t always reaching the ears of those who wanted to listen. Through auto reflection we realised Barcelona Producció’s communication and identity needed to become as emergent and contemporary as the art it supports. Subsequently, this also meant entering the environment of a creative and digitised generation, as well as an alignment to the language and media channels they use to communicate and generate information about what is going on in terms of culture and the arts.
“After winning the trust of ICUB, we turned the identity of BCN Producció into a Brand Narrative Campaign, focusing on content related to the surroundings of each artist instead of focusing on the center of their creation.”
Rafa Martínez, COO, Partner & Brand Strategist at Folch
Proposing a strategic repositioning of the brand through brand narrative, our idea was to primarily bring the figure of the artist into a contemporary context, using modern day communication media such as a website, Instagram and Facebook as primary channels, with the aim of making artist, artistic work and practical information broadly accessible to the target audience. On a second level we also wanted to connect the artists to the city they interact with; Barcelona, a city framed as an environment for emerging art and creativity, much in line with projects like betevé or Barcelona Design Week, which position the Barcelona brand in its multiplicity.
As the goal was to enter the digital community and to surpass the distance between artist and audience, we based the campaign on the very online environment we wanted to enter; a world of creative Instagram accounts in which closeness, avant-gardism and daily life videos have become protagonists. Following this line, we chose video to be the focus of the rebranding, positioning it centrally in every piece of the identity. Key to this concept is the web, which features full screen videos that enhance interaction to the maximum.
“The strength of Barcelona Producció relies on communicating through powerful content: the relationship between the artists and their context –the city of Barcelona– which brings the artists closer to the audience in a genuine way.”
Raimon Guirado, Senior Designer and Art Director at Folch
After many redesigns of the logo, we also stepped away from a logo centralised identity and created a strong and distinct brand narrative for the brand and its 2017 campaign, projecting content that would be easily recognisable for the audience. The three layered logo (Ajuntament de Barcelona – La Capella – BCN Producció) thus made way for a phrase that both functions as a claim and logotype; Barcelona Producció és una iniciativa cultural de La Capella, bringing the brand to its very essence.
Visually, we used frames of the videos produced as supporting images in print. The actual info was segregated completely from its photographic counterparts through the use of a very simple and clean typography; Suisse by Swiss Typefaces. It is reminiscent of a descriptive, almost journalistic tone as to leave the focus on the image and allows it to speak for itself. The zooms we used as images from the campaign reminds us of something in between art and a picture of everyday life.
Video featuring the surroundings of artist Irene Solà
With contemporary audiovisual language in mind, we based the brand narrative and video direction on millennial video making and internet culture in which the surroundings and everyday life of the artist are emphasized. As the videos would form the base of the campaign, we shot four videos featuring the personal style and life of every artist supported by the brand; three short films, one long play, all shot with a cell phone under the guidance of production house White Horse and video editor Aitor Bigas, who took up part of the direction during this project.
Video featuring the surroundings of artist Irene Solà
“The aesthetic basis of the videos is simple and minimalist destruction and experimentation, the discourse is amateur. As a reference we used the random audiovisual material we encounter on our newsfeeds and Instagram stories.”
Aitor Bigas, Video Editor
Video featuring the surroundings of artist Claudia Pagès
Entering the digital environment nowadays means going beyond a website. If a brand doesn’t communicate through social media it loses a relevant part of an audience which absorbs information, events and inspirational content through social media and the community they created around them. This is exactly where we took Barcelona Producció and its communication; Facebook and Instagram, with short but visually strong and attractive videos designed for sharing within this online reality. Interrelating the communities of artist, expo space and supporting initiative, key to this campaign is the aim for mass communication and generating an own online community, visibility of new and emerging art(ists), as well as captivating a new segment of people ready to discover all that is Barcelona Producció.
Following this idea, in the activation campaign we first identified possibilities for interaction between user and BCN Producció’s network. We enabled a newsletter Sign Up on the website to help grow a community of subscribers, as well as links to Google Calendar and Facebook event pages we created for each of the 18 upcoming artists. Through Google Analytics and tracking events we gained more understanding of user behaviour within the consumption of arts and culture. As for Paid Media we created adverts personalized to each event, as well as an ad campaign that would generate more traffic on the web. This way we created an audience already familiar with BCN Producció which would be more likely to attend its events, on top of gaining a more profound identification of the niche target.
More 2017 artists to be presented soon: Àlex Muñoz, Anna Moreno, Camille Orny i Magda Vaz, Christina Schultz, Claudia Pagès, Dani Montlleó, David Mutiloa, Eliana Beltrán, Irene Solà, Irina Mutt, Les Brontë, Marco Noris, Matteo Guidi, Nyamnyam, Paco Chanivet, Quim Pujol i Taller Estampa.
