Berlin: Overview

With the destruction of ‘that’ wall in 1989 came a burst of creativity as artists the world over flocked to Berlin to paint the town red, and other colours. They stayed, turned the city into a giant gallery and set up agencies, too. As Joe Lancaster discovers, creatives are still arriving, drawn to a biodiverse pool of global talent in a flourishing ad industry

Walk around Berlin for a few hours and try not to feel inspired. Unless you’re some sort of android, you’ll find it impossible. Its fusion of beautiful buildings in the west and gritty, urban landscapes in the east is smattered with art like a giant Jackson Pollock painting. Graffiti, stickers and massive murals occupy every square inch of wall space and it all means something.

In the final months before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, artists flocked from all over the globe to leave their mark on it. When it finally came down the artists stayed and set up galleries and creative communities in the abandoned buildings of the east side. Since then they’ve been joined by like-minded people keen to take advantage of the freedom of expression and cheap living costs. “Because Berlin is still really affordable there are no ‘starving artists’, just artists, and thousands of them,” says Myles Lord, creative director at Berlin agency Heimat. “The modern Berlin is an urban art gallery. You get inspired just walking to work.”

The world comes calling

Heimat harnessed talent from the underground art scene by using the legendary street artist El Bocho to work on their Go Beyond Borders project for CNN, which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall via art installations.

Naturally, some of the founders of Berlin’s art scene went on to start ad agencies and production companies, and in the last decade or two the city has become a major player on Germany’s ad scene, hotly tipped by many to overtake Hamburg as the country’s centre of creative advertising. “Young creative people from all over the world come to Berlin to try to do something and it’s a great source to pick from to achieve what you want to do. I don’t think that people from New York are interested in going to Düsseldorf or Frankfurt, so the source we have to choose from is more international,” says Stephan Vens, executive producer at production company Trigger Happy.

This pool of international talent helps win global clients, according to Peter Gocht, creative director at Jung von Matt Berlin, an agency that employs creatives from the Netherlands, USA and Brazil, and boasts Nikon as one of its international accounts. “We’ve always done international ads for German brands like Mercedes, Audi, VW, BMW and Siemens, but now non-German clients have started choosing Berlin or German agencies as their lead agencies.” His creative partner Christian Kroll adds that it’s easier to service those clients when you’ve got international thinkers on board. “You can’t do it with just German people. We’ve got the opportunity to recruit international people and this is only happening in Berlin.”

Scripts are improving too, after a lull two years ago according to Nils Schwemer, executive producer at Stink Berlin. “We see fantastic stuff from Berlin agencies like VCCP. There’s a good breed of young creatives in Germany.”

Schwemer also believes the country is catching up in the realm of mixed media campaigns. “Germany’s always been behind other countries in using other forms of media. In places like London they do more daring stuff online and with social media but now Germany is getting on the train and that opens up opportunities.” He’s referring to projects like Heimat’s The Next Big Thing campaign for Audi, comprising an interactive series of webisodes featuring Justin Timberlake in a Jason Bourne-like role, and Jung von Matt’s Last Call for TV channel 13th Street Universal, creative-directed by Gocht and Kroll. The latter saw cinema audiences plunged into an interactive film that decided the fate of a girl trying to escape from a serial killer. Using specially developed software, including mobile-phone based voice recognition, one viewer would receive a call from the the damsel in distress and help her escape. “It’s a pretty good example of a new way of working that we like, that every creative has to offer a broader variety in his skills. You can no longer be focused on being good at TV, print or online, you have to understand every media channel,” says Kroll of the project’s merging of a classical medium with interactivity.

Achtung all adbusters

Despite this surge in international, creative thinking, Berlin’s eight Lions at Cannes were still dwarfed by Hamburg’s 57. If you ask Guido Heffels though, one of Heimat’s founding members, he’ll tell you that awards don’t really mean much. And while many agencies have recently opened branches in Berlin, Heimat went the other way and cut the ribbon on its first satellite office in Hamburg on June 1, proving that the capital’s creative juices are flowing far and wide, though it’s unlikely Heffels will be moving there any time soon.

Another current trend in Berlin is an attitude of authenticity in advertising, which Heimat’s Myles Lord believes is crucial to win over the public and the city’s intensely critical adbusters. “What makes Berlin unique is that the underground urban art community seems to reject advertising and commercialism. If they don’t like your billboard they’ll deface it, or rather turn it into something cool or more relevant. They’ll change the message of a brand to reflect a social comment or simply show their disapproval. Adbusting is not new by any means, but in Berlin it’s an art form!”

If there is going to be a revolution in German creativity, this is surely the place it will happen. Berlin is like a living, breathing, organic art gallery that reinvents itself every day, and if you put something on a wall that the people don’t like, don’t worry, they’ll redesign it for you.