Brand Activation Berlin: Hendrick's Gin 3D Anamorphic Art

Brand activation in Berlin demands more than presence. This is how Hendrick's Gin used anamorphic art to make the city stop and look twice.

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There is a standard formula for anamorphic brand activations. A surface is painted — usually the floor of a high-footfall public space. The optical illusion only resolves from one viewing angle, so passersby are invited to find the spot, step into the image, and photograph themselves inside it. The format works. Brands use it repeatedly.

What it cannot do, by definition, is reach people who are not already close enough to see it.

For the Hendrick's Gin "Escape the Conventional" activation at Potsdamer Platz, Basa Studio — working alongside [m]STUDIO, a Düsseldorf-based communications agency within the WPP/GroupM ecosystem — added a second element that changed this entirely. Alongside the 5 x 5 metre floor painting, a 2.5 x 5 metre wall component was installed. The wall is visible from a distance at which a floor painting would be completely invisible.

"A 3D floor painting can be walked past without being noticed — you have to be standing in the right spot to see it," says Charlotte Specht, co-founder of Basa Studio. "A wall element catches people from much further away. It draws them in before they even understand what they're looking at."

This is not a minor production variation. It is a fundamentally different approach to the catchment radius of a public activation — the distance at which it begins to work.

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The artwork was created by Manfred Stader, who began pavement and street painting during his art studies in the early 1980s and became one of the first artists in Germany to develop large-scale anamorphic commissions for brand clients. Anamorphic art — also called 3D street art or one-point perspective art — requires the viewer to find a specific physical position before the illusion resolves. From any other angle, it reads as a distorted, stretched image. From the correct vantage point, it appears to leap off the surface.

That bodily requirement is, for brand purposes, its defining feature. An audience does not passively receive an anamorphic artwork. They search for the angle, adjust their position, and then enter the illusion — a sequence that takes several seconds and produces a qualitatively different memory from walking past a poster.

For Hendrick's Gin, whose brand universe draws on Victorian curiosity, botanical eccentricity, and theatrical wit, the format had natural alignment. The artwork's motif was rooted in the gin's own visual identity — the cucumber and rose that define its flavour profile and appear throughout its brand world — translated into a spatial experience that rewarded attention and made the audience feel they had discovered something, rather than been shown it.

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The production process for this activation reflects a deliberate strategic choice worth understanding. The artwork required approximately ten days of studio preparation by Stader before installation — not unusual for anamorphic commissions of this scale and complexity. The standard approach is to prepare 80 to 90 percent of the work in advance, then complete the remaining portion live on site over half a day to a full day, giving audiences the experience of watching the artwork finish in real time.

Hendrick's Gin chose differently.

"The client wanted a 100% finished artwork that only had to be set up. So that engagement could start immediately." Specht explains.

That decision compressed the entire activation window into pure public engagement time. A three-day outdoor activation in central Berlin is a finite resource. Every hour spent completing the work on site is an hour not spent generating the photo moments, the organic documentation, and the social sharing that make experiential marketing in Berlin commercially justifiable. For this campaign, the trade-off was resolved in favour of maximum engagement time from the first minute the installation was live.

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The total project investment came in just under €50,000, covering artwork production, artist fee, and installation across the three-day activation at Potsdamer Platz.

For context: this is a purpose-built, large-format anamorphic artwork combining floor and wall elements, by one of Germany's most experienced practitioners of the format, in one of Europe's highest-footfall urban locations, produced to a finished state before installation. The budget reflects that scope. For brands assessing what outdoor brand activation in Europe at this level of cultural quality costs, it is a meaningful reference point.

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A detail that distinguishes this activation from a one-time public installation: the artwork was redeployed. After the initial three-day run at Potsdamer Platz, the Hendrick's Gin anamorphic installation appeared again at the Botanischer Garten in Berlin during the Botanische Nacht in July 2019 — part of the city's annual botanical garden night event, which draws audiences with a very different profile from Potsdamer Platz's tourist and commuter footfall.

That redeployment changes how the project should be evaluated. A single production investment — the ten days of studio preparation, the artist's fee, the logistics — generated two distinct brand moments in two distinct cultural contexts within the same summer campaign. The artwork served as a recurring physical landmark across the broader "Escape the Conventional" programme rather than a one-time installation.

For brands planning outdoor brand activation across a multi-event campaign calendar, this model deserves attention. The marginal cost of a second deployment is substantially lower than the cost of a second production.

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The strategic objective for this activation was direct: high engagement with the brand in a prominent public location, a photo moment in the middle of the city, and a physical expression of the Hendrick's brand world that could reach audiences with no prior relationship to the gin.

What the floor-plus-wall configuration delivered, beyond the standard anamorphic format, was a two-stage capture mechanism. The wall caught attention at distance. The floor resolved into an experience that required physical participation to complete. Together, they created an activation that could recruit passersby from further away and then hold them for longer — the two variables that determine whether a public activation justifies its investment.

Basa Studio works with brands on outdoor and experiential activations across Germany and Europe — from single installations to multi-touchpoint cultural campaigns. Get in touch to discuss how this approach could work for your next brand moment.