Connect with Fast Company

The client's request to its ad agency started out simply enough: Figure out what to do with the billboard the company had just secured in Times Square. It was the dead of winter 2002 when the brief landed on the desk of Brian Collins, executive creative director of the Brand Integration Group at Ogilvy & Mather in New York. Collins marched a little band of staffers over to check out the site. They stood at the center of Times Square and peered up Broadway to see how the space might look to a tourist from Omaha, Nebraska. They crouched on the sidewalk to envision it through the eyes of a 5-year-old. Then they went back to the office to dream big chocolaty dreams.

Nine months later, with the help of a cadre of architects, special-effects artists, painters, and plumbers, their beyond-the-billboard fantasies came to life when the first Hershey retail store opened at the corner of West 48th Street and Broadway, encompassing a 15-story facade celebrating Hershey's brands and a street-level shop that's nirvana for chocoholics. The building uses the visual language of architecture to tell the mythical tale of a chocolate company that set up shop in the city near the end of World War I and awkwardly expanded upward as it grew. With its retro lighting (exposed neon and lightbulbs that regularly burn out) and factory pipes belching colored steam, it's at once ironic, silly, and instantly engaging. By Times Square's current aesthetic -- huge retina-blasting LED screens and semi-pornographic billboards -- it's a throwback to simpler times. By hip contemporary design standards, it's cunningly crafted, but isn't cool.

Collins couldn't care less. Wrong standard, he says. The real question is, Does it tell the Hershey story? Does it make something happen? "Design is not a plan for decoration," he says. His goal is something more tangible, the definition Charles Eames preferred: "Design is a plan for action."

By that measure, the Hershey store is a blockbuster. It gives people an opportunity to experience the brand with all five senses. Candy-themed songs play on the sound system; the smell of chocolate is in the air; every Hershey brand is available to taste. On weekends, tourists line up for blocks to get in, to play with the hand-cranked gizmo that noisily propels a stream of Hershey's Kisses down a curved ramp from the ceiling into a bucket, or to buy Jolly Rancher candies, Reese's Pieces, or Kit Kat mugs, pencils, and T-shirts. Did the design produce action? You bet. Hershey says more than 2.3 million people visit every year.

The Mad Genius

The development of a new retailing concept is hardly a traditional ad agency task. But for Collins's team, it's par for the course. Known internally as BIG, the Brand Integration Group is Ogilvy's in-house strategic branding and design consultancy, founded eight years ago to bridge the divide between advertising and design. "Brian's group deconstructs the visual presence of the brand and re-creates it," says Bill Gray, president of Ogilvy & Mather New York. "More often, you don't know what will come out: street art, Web sites, a store, events."

The ad industry's plotline used to be a lot simpler: See the commercial, go to the store, buy the product. Now advertisers have to reach consumers in less-conventional ways -- on the subway, on the street, on a cell phone, on a mug, on a cab, in a skate park, in a store, on a truck. It's the perfect moment for Collins, with his affinity for many media and a design vocabulary that ranges from Disney to George Nelson.