BMO200: WISH it Forward
The Bank of Montreal wanted to mark their 200th birthday by giving a gift back to the communities it serves. That gift was wrapped in a towering, Waterless, fountain.
The 17-foot kinetic sculpture flowed, with the gentle synchronized melody from over 50,000 stock ticker flip dots, impossibly from a floating chrome cantilever. While it drew attention as a piece of art, the real magic was in its function. People could toss digital coins into it, from their paired devices, to make wishes for others. Multiple physical fountains toured Canada during the campaign year, plus people could wish online from three countries. The BMO200 Fountain became the centerpiece of a cross-platform, year-long, fully integrated campaign, designed to help people wish it forward.
With the flick of a finger, a digital coin left the wisher’s phone and the fountain responded. There was a different flow design that corresponded to every coin, which represented the theme of the wisher’s wish. e.g. Community
Online fountain at bmo200.com
I wish… I could take credit for the fountain.
The video below tells the fountain’s story and will give you a sense of how magical the thing actually was. I joined the campaign just as the final flip dot panels were being assembled. My role was to be the Creative Director for the wish granting portion of the campaign. So if you’re interested in chatting with the brilliant mind behind the fountain, talk to my good friend and former colleague Jess Willis. To see the wishes we granted and the content that came from that process, keep scrolling :)
AS Tens of thousands of wishes were tossed into the digital fountain, we worked with BMO to select the ones that would be granted.
Our goal was to grant one wish per month for an entire year, which we hit. Here are a few my faves that I played an integral role in.
fulfilling wishes for an entire year was a life-altering opportunity, both creatively and personally. Perhaps there’s no better example than the very first wish we granted.
The wish was from a mom from Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, named Anne. her wish was inspired by her young son Mason, and kids just like him, who regularly had to spend time in the hospital for treatments. Not only did we plan to build the Lego City Anne wished for, but we worked hard to design a kid-approved structure that would offer an experience that would make hospital visits feel a little less like hospital visits.
Original concept mockup for the installation.
The LEGO City itself was crafted to be a small sense of Home… away from home.
It included Lego versions of local landmarks, a miniature BMO branch, and some special little houses; we asked kids from the hospital, including Mason, to send us drawings of their homes and hired a professional LEGO architect to turn them into small, studded replicas.
The drawings were displayed, in the final city, beside their LEGO versions.
Replica of the giant Cape Breton fiddle.
Local BMO employees helped us grant every wish in the campaign. For Wish one, they put together a lot of lego.
20 employees from Sydney and Halifax spent a day building LEGO sets that would ultimately become part of the final LEGO City. We even noted their efforts with a small billboard in the City.
4 days of Building and 35,000 pieces later, we revealed it to mason and his friends.
The reveal to the families and staff at the hospital made it clear what the rest of the year was really about. We were affecting real lives and that was the part of these executions we needed to get most right.
Granting the wishes in a meaningful way meant really understanding what was at their core. Wish Two was for a coffee machine, but not really.
Wish 2 caught our eye because of its simplicity. We thought, “Wait, a coffee machine is all Melanie wants?” After talking with Melanie though, we understood that her wish was really about recognizing the selfless and often unrecognized efforts of her colleagues at Kid’s Help Phone. She and her team of counsellors regularly work through the night, on calls with kids who need a compassionate ear and calming voice. Needless to say, stepping away from a call for a coffee just isn’t an option. Yet, a coffee can serve as the fuel (and tiny bit of self care) a counselor needs to get through a tough call. Having learned about Melanie and her team, we went one step further than a coffee machine.
Uplifting Blends was a year’s supply of coffee for the staff at Kid’s Help Phone. The packaging was designed to remind them how valued they are.
(Click/tap to expand.) Each variant of Uplifting Blends was inspired by one unique quality held by the Kid’s Help Phone team. Each also included a quote from a child who had been directly helped by one of the councilors involved.
She thought she was taking a trip to photograph a hockey team. Instead, she took off.
A lot of people dream of flying at mach speeds, but not all of them are as brave and selfless as Cindy Rogers. In 2012 Cindy jumped into frigid waters, in an effort to save a woman who’s jeep had veered off the road. She was recognized with a medal of bravery, but her friend Marissa wanted to do something that went far beyond recognition. Marissa wanted to build a positive memory around Cindy’s traumatic memory.
On the day Marissa’s wish was granted, Cindy, an amateur photographer, thought she was coming to the hanger to photograph a Junior A hockey team. She was super wrong ;)
some wishes were granted in a more nimble way, not requiring the robust production crews that others did. For these, I wrote plus directed the executions.
Wishes seven, nine, and ten all fell into this camp. One was granted in Toronto, another in Montreal, and the third took us to England where BMO has international branches.
Statement at the front of the gallery.
(Click/Tap to enlarge) Unbeknownst to her, we pulled quotes from a pre shoot interview with Charlotte to project on the gallery walls, surrounding her mom’s art. Above is the gallery layout designed for Ginette’s show.
Cards were designed with Ginette’s information, so patrons could contact her for commissions or to buy pieces from her website. Ginette’s details were also added to the social copy when the video content was launched.
The final wish we granted was the most challenging and thrilling production of my career. There was no margin for error.
Not only did it involve people who spoke three different languages, it required us to give direction to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra just one hour before they had to play a show for hundreds of people with an international deaf rapper that we flew in from Denmark the night before. It all worked out :)
