Pop-Kultur, Kittens & Puppies, 2017 - Read

I started doing the promotional campaigns for Berlin’s annual Pop-Kultur music festival in 2015. It was a shaky start. I think we managed to get one good film out of several ideas and the poster campaign was too wordy… I kind of got it wrong. In 2016 – and in discussion with the festival’s curator, Martin Hossbach – we had the idea that we should not try to promote the festival in the normal way: posters, on-line and editorial advertising, etc.

Instead, we would make something more permanent, ‘make some pop culture’ rather than advertise ‘Pop-Kultur’. I can’t remember exactly how it came about, but we decided we should make a film. We did this in the form of Kurt’s Lighter, directed by Paul Kelly (Lawrence of Belgravia, Dexys: Nowhere is Home). The film turned out brilliantly well, but had very little promotion, and online ‘views’ were poor. I needed to re-think the approach for 2017.

Martin and I worked closely. We enjoyed sitting in the ‘egg bars’ of Neukölln, dreaming up ideas. From one of these discussions, we decided that a more direct approach was needed. The original intention was that the festival would be ‘international’, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that the only international thing about it were the live acts; those in attendance were strictly local.

Berlin is perhaps the last great ‘poster city’. Where most other cities across the world have clamped down on fly-posting, seeing it as a form of vandalism, Berlin positively encourages it. The posters that cover the city are an inherent part of its identity – along with the stickers that cover every pub and club toilet cubicle. Printed information still rules on the streets of Berlin.

The best posters in the city at that time were for Volksbühne (people’s theatre), by design group LSD. These posters were fantastic, gothic black letters on fluorescent colours – every time I saw these posters, I was jealous. In a moment of pub excitement, at one of our prolonged egg bar meetings, I told Martin, “Our mission should be to make better posters than Volksbühne.” I think I then shouted, “I want to be the Poster King of Berlin!”

So, for 2017, it was decided that all our efforts would go into making great posters. I’d promised something special – a bespoke poster for every band, “some kind of illustration”, I told them. The problem was, I had no idea what these illustrations should be. Simultaneously to this, Pop-Kultur had started an Instagram account. It was painfully unpopular – 23 likes for a band most people had never heard of.

I mentioned this to Martin, “Maybe we just need to put popular images on Instagram. The lowest common denominator. If we put a picture of a puppy or a kitten on there, you can guarantee that at least 100 people will like it. Then we just write about the band underneath.”

It took a whole day for penny to drop: if this works on Instagram, then maybe it would work as a poster campaign? Suddenly – and almost accidentally – we had a big idea: take the most popular Instagram images imaginable – puppies and kittens – and use them as the street poster campaign for the festival. It doesn’t matter that a kitten has nothing to do with Arab Strap or Lady Leshurr… in fact it’s better that it doesn’t – the kittens become the identity of the festival, not the artists. It will be poetic, it will be pop.

Because the ‘big idea’ was so clear, the design of the posters took me almost no time at all. They had to hint at Instagram without pastiching it – the name of the artist had to be big enough to connect in the viewer’s mind directly to the kitten image. All the other information had to be secondary to that immediate reading.

This campaign was a runaway success. In a Baudrillardian looping information nightmare of joy, the posters were photographed endlessly and fed back into Instagram. I was delighted – Scott King

Puppies & Kittens – King explains the rationale behind his 2017 poster campaign for Berlin’s annual Pop-Kultur festival