Frankfurt 2015: The Audi stand is so on brand
A journey into Audi’s self-standing building that’s a temple to the brand with the four rings
Despite its 578,000-square-metres of exhibition space across ten exhibition halls, Audi doesn’t consider the Frankfurt Messe venue to offer quite what it’s looking for when it comes to its motor show exhibit.
For the past few editions of the show, Audi has built a freestanding event temple dedicated to itself. This year’s is certainly the most technologically advanced, as it works to define itself as the tech leader when compared to its big rivals.
The interior of the monolithic, monochrome exterior is accessed via an escalator that leads you to a ‘brand experience’ before you reach the main hall.
You’re greeted first by a corridor, lit with neon, that has windows that look into the hall. On these are holographic, augmented reality projections of an Audi HMI system and the digital gauge pack of the new TT. It’s hard not to be impressed.
Next, you pass through a plastic sheet door that leads you into an ice-filled room, chilled to below freezing, with ‘quattro’ embedded on its frozen walls.
Following this is a black metal-lined corridor full of LED racing brake lights that ends at the wheels of Audi’s latest Le Mans LMP1 car.
While other stands don’t even have doors, it’s only once you get past all this, that you’re allowed to descend into the hall itself, a giant overhead compass spells out the firm’s four key messages – Sport, Quattro, Ultra and Technologies.
Each cardinal point on the compass aims at a full-size TT, A4, R8 or Q3 that spins like a top on its respective screen.
It must be vastly, hugely, enormously expensive to build, but the packed venue even on press day where the crowds are at their most cynical, is testament to the fact that the brand-building in the brand building must work.