The idea behind the campaign and the brand is inspired by the main aspects that make the Elbphilharmonie so outstanding:

a) Iconicity. The iconic shape of the building is the core of the brand and is always visible in the campaign, guaranteeing recognisability and uniqueness.

b) Reflection. The inverted reflection on the water of the River Elbe highlights the building’s premium location. This reflection is also present in all campaign posters.

c) Music. The rhythmical and musical reflection lines from within the logo come to life in the campaign’s headline, reinforcing the idea of a water surface, where poetically speaking “the music flows”.

All three factors lead to a distinct and unique brand campaign that highlights and celebrates the building’s outstanding qualities.

After years of an almost completed building, we needed more than pictures to re-earn people’s enthusiasm. We needed a distinctive layout with bold messages, in order to give the subject a new twist.

Inspired by the building’s location on the water, the layout follows a puristic interpretation of a reflection and inverts all content that is below the surface, creating an immediate eye-catcher. The inverted image is then combined with the logo elements that expand and come to life: the iconic building on the water surface and the combination of typography and rhythmical logo-lines below. The adaptability of this campaign style and the power of its graphic elements made it possible to also manage without pictures for the opening announcement.

Altogether it results in a very distinguished way of promoting a philharmonic hall, with a memorable design that, with its independence, is still a recognisable tribute to the original brand identity.

The iconicity and uniqueness of these posters, and the visual and conceptual link to the whole brand identity, clearly contributed to the success of a very unified and iconic opening campaign. Out of home reached more than 300 million media contacts, while the whole launch campaign created 50,000 media reports and had a global reach of 22 billion prior to and after the Elbphilharmonie’s opening in January 2017.

The charming, self-ironic and entertaining tonality, in combination with an indistinguishable and fresh layout, turned these posters into a style-setter and tonality guidance for many other initiatives within the launch campaign, which led to a complete image turnaround, a fully sold-out opening season, and a total of one and a half million visitors in less than six months. It clearly made everybody enthusiastic about the Elbphilharmonie again.