Creative Profile: B-Reel; Digital Devotees

Back in 1999, when content more often meant ‘happy’, five men foretold that the world would be subsumed by a tsunami of zeros and ones. They set up B-Reel to lead the digital wave of change with such novelties as interactive storytelling websites. Danny Edwards meets the still-innovating Swedish soothsayers

Fifteen years. Like everything, it depends on your point of view as to whether that is a long time, but a decade and a half ago, in 1999 the world was, to coin a cliché, a different place. Fax was still the dominant way of quickly getting documents from one place to another, mobile phones were only mobile if you had fairly strong biceps and the internet was a magical place that few people had visited and even fewer knew their way around. In 15 years though, the technological changes the world has seen have been phenomenal and while most can’t truthfully admit to having seen it all coming, or even be able to keep up with the changes that are still happening, one company, born in 1999, has been at the forefront of the digital revolution from the beginning.

B-Reel, founded in Stockholm by five partners – Anders Wahlquist, Fredrik Heinig, Johannes Åhlund, Petter Westlund and Pelle Nilsson – has deftly and creatively navigated the changing landscape of advertising output since they opened, and in 2014, on their fifteenth anniversary their place within that landscape remains as solid and as interesting as ever. Back in 1999 two of the five founders, Heinig and Åhlund, were already running their own commercials production company, called Spader Knekt (later renamed St Paul, through which Nilsson was directing), but along with the two other men decided to open B-Reel (the two companies merged in 2007 to simply be known as B-Reel). “The deal was to set out with them to do something digital,” explains Wahlquist, as he, Nilsson and I talk during the Cannes Lions festival. “The idea was to combine the experience and competence they already had and mix it with whatever we could on the digital side, whether that was mobile or online… basically new media.”

Ah, ‘new media’, a term not used for some time because, well, it’s not new anymore. But it illustrates the point at which the company started out. This was all untried and untested but the founders of B-Reel knew that it was where the world was heading. “We did a lot of evangelism,” Wahlquist says, explaining how they attempted to make people see that their belief in technology was well-placed. “We didn’t have any clients but we met with TV channels, media companies, agencies, blue chip companies… whoever, really.” But this was the turn of the 21st Century, when dotcom companies went from boom to bust in a matter of months. “At first they didn’t have time to talk to us as they were too busy watching their stock prices rise,” laughs Wahlquist. “Then came the crash and nobody had any money.” It was Wahlquist having most of these conversations with different people and companies. He, as the more business-minded of the quintet [Heinig, Åhlund and Nilsson are production while Westlund is more creative and technology focused], was charged with convincing people that B-Reel’s vision was a sound one.

And luckily some companies saw the potential in what B-Reel was doing and employed them to help with their digital strategies. Mobile phone retailer Three was one such company and their sales pitch was based on customers having access to quality video content on their new phones, so B-Reel were at the centre of that. They also worked with other clients on web and mobile games, on concerts, motion graphics and TV channel rebranding. Sweden was always more likely to embrace B-Reel’s ethos as it was a much more forward-thinking digital nation. The infrastructure and understanding of the Swedes was much more evolved than many other places. “Swedes, generally, are very curious,” says Nilsson. “We’re a small country and it’s often very dark and very cold and people are sitting indoors fiddling with their computers instead of being outside having a nice drink with their neighbours.”

Pioneering Doritos’ digital hotel

What the members of B-Reel saw was that the digital world could and should be a connected realm. That the different platforms, programs and software should be interlinked to created seamless integrated experiences. Obvious now, isn’t it? But 15 years ago that was a bold vision. “I think we just thought that the web was super-boring,” says Nilsson. “There was nothing emotional in there, no storytelling. We wanted to have the feeling that everything was connected in the experiences we delivered. It was something that needed to be done.” But it still took some time before the company achieved its ambition. When asked if there was a piece of work that B-Reel produced that they think turned the tide and made people sit up and take notice, Nilsson and Wahlquist cite Doritos’ Hotel 626. Released in 2008, a full nine years after the company’s inception, Hotel 626 was a website that melded technology with storytelling. Only online between the hours of 6am and 6pm the site placed users in a very scary 3D created hotel and allowed them to navigate a series of puzzles and adventures to find their way out. Using webcam images and linking to users’ actual mobile phones, the campaign was a huge leap forward in digital advertising and interaction. “That project,” says Wahlquist, “was where it all came together; where you had gaming elements that had not been done before on the web, the interactivity and the storytelling which was such a huge part of it. We’d done a lot of work in similar projects up to that point and we’d been experimenting and taking different routes, but Hotel 626 is where everything combined.” “I think it was the first time that people got an emotional experience on the internet,” adds Nilsson.

“The internet is a very good medium in many ways but at that time it wasn’t emotional at all; it was mechanistic and you weren’t entertained by it.” The campaign won a gold Lion in Cannes and was the springboard to future successes.

Those successes have seen B-Reel become one of the most creatively ambitious and technically accomplished companies working in the advertising industry today. After the global success of Hotel 626 the company opened an office in New York in 2007, then London in 2008 and in the following years, offices in Los Angeles, Barcelona and Berlin. How, though, do they keep at the cutting edge of technology and apply that to campaigns and projects for a variety of clients? “We’re always experimenting,” says Wahlquist, simply. “Doing lots of R&D and trying things out. It’s about seeing possibilities, about being curious and interested and learning, and it’s about hacking things. When a new device comes out we tear it apart and see what it can do from a user-interface point of view. When something new comes out we always see it as an opportunity. Like, ‘this is cool, what can we do with it? How can we play with it? How can we get it into our projects? How can we have fun with it?’”

When the company started in 1999 they, along with the rest of the world, were on the cusp of a huge revolution in both the advancement and use of technology. B-Reel embraced those advances and used them to create clever and compelling brand stories, but have we reached a technological plateau now? Can things keep on evolving to the extent that they have in the previous 15 years? “No,” says Nilsson, “it’s not going to be the same, it’s going to get even faster. I think it’s now hard to determine what is going to happen next because we’ve caught up with what people in the past thought the technology of the future would be like. I mean, things like the iPhone, the iPad, YouTube, they’re all pretty recent inventions and look how much they’ve changed everything. It’s too hard now to predict what will happen next. It was,” he laughs, “easier back in 1999.”

Getting ahead of shifting platforms

Of course, B-Reel has evolved into something more than just a digital company. The commercial and feature film arms of the business are hugely successful, with films such as last year’s psychological drama Hotell and the upcoming, post-WWII-set release Gentlemen & Gangsters gaining widespread praise, alongside commercial films for a host of clients, among them Mercedes, Google, H&M, Nike and Audi. But B-Reel’s creative endeavours don’t stop there. The company also has B-Reel Products, which concentrates on researching and developing products, platforms and applications without the need for a client. Plus, there’s B-Reel Content which, as the name suggests, focusses on creating branded and original content across a variety of platforms. While some more traditional production companies have often found it hard to fold the digital side of commercial production into their business, B-Reel have seemingly been adept at adding offerings to their digital base that have their origins in more traditional production. This, they say, is because it has been harder for the industry as a whole to adapt to digital but that B-Reel didn’t need to adapt because “it was in our DNA, we started with digital”.

Something that all of these areas of production have in common is storytelling. Be it a TV commercial, branded film or interactive game, B-Reel’s genius lies in its ability to make compelling, interesting and addictive stories come to life on whatever platform they use and, as Nilsson alluded to, those platforms will continue to change but B-Reel will be at the forefront of making them work. “Technology is increasingly coming into our lives in a way that it’s not an obstacle [and] it’s interesting to see how people look at it now,” Nilsson says. “Google Glass for example; everyone says it’s some sort of ‘nerd glass’ or something, but we can’t stop it, it’s here to stay and more of that sort of technology is going to happen and it’s interesting how content will be able to get in front of you.”

 Thrilled by the ever-moving goalposts of excellence

As for their own future, Nilsson and Wahlquist say that, for now, they are more than happy with their six offices, though they don’t discount the prospect of more openings in the future. What excites them the most is the thought that the boundaries of what can be achieved keep extending and the goalposts of creative excellence keep being moved. “I think the convergence of the different fields we’re working in hasn’t finished at all,” notes Wahlquist. “We talk to big companies all the time about where things are going and it’s not really clear. There will be a breakthrough at some point, where someone will manage to create the Wilderness Downtown of storytelling in a different media. There is a huge space where people can do new things; the combination of advertising, entertainment, technology. We’re just seeing the beginning of that.”