The Salesforce Waterfall - The Ultimate Brand Experience

It was an ordinary summer day in 2015 when my colleague Peter Sapienza asked me to work on a project with him for a Salesforce LED video wall (installed by the best in the biz, SNA and managed by the amazing team at Sensory Interactive).  At the time, freshly installed at 50 Fremont St. in San Francisco the 108’ long wall was the largest LED canvas in the world. We were connected with J.D. Swartz, John Zissimos and their brilliant team (Mike Mazza, Beau Bouverat, Katie Rinki, Taylor Hilficker, Seneya Tilahun, Clementine Ngo-Anh, Caitlin Tartaglia) to work on a few video concepts for the massive wall.  The Salesforce team led the creative on the project with clean and efficient ideas, specifically a Redwood scene and a Waterfall that would break over the elevator bays. The agency I worked for at the time, Obscura, was tasked with bringing these scenes to life, the Redwoods were filmed with Red Epic cameras and the Waterfall was produced using state of the art CGI and fluid dynamics (provided by Fusion CSI).  Special thanks to other partners on the project including SNA and Sensory interactive for consistent and impeccable execution on the project. The resulting work provided immediate relief from the busy downtown San Francisco steel and glass architecture.  I remember walking into the lobby from the street to review the media, and I would take a deep breath as soon as I saw all that green, just as I did in the Del Norte Redwoods where we shot the footage. The waterfall also brought an immediate sense of peace, tranquility and awe.  And then something very strange happened, a local reporter made an iPhone video of the Salesforce Waterfall and posted it on social media...and within hours there were 2 million views. Then other media outlets picked it up, and then ten million views, then twenty million. I began tracking them using social media analytics as the views crested 100 million, that was four years ago and the number of views and impressions have continued to explode.  And the brilliant lesson we learned here, is that overt branding cannot compare to the power of fine art and natural beauty. This was an end run into a new marketing modality, when you give people some beauty, peace and even awe via video they love you for it.  People love Salesforce and everything they stand for, and they effectively branded Redwoods and the Waterfall their own, sans logo or text, and in doing so, set the standard for experiential branding in public spaces. To this day these works and all the copies that followed are known as the “Salesforce Waterfall”, and the “Salesforce Redwoods”.