Black Girls Rock! × Amazon

Black Girls Rock! was founded by DJ Beverly Bond in 2006 and grew into an awards show that ran on BET for ten years, with Michelle Obama on its stage along the way. In 2022 its festival, BGR!Fest, took over Washington, DC for Independence Day weekend, from the Kennedy Center to the 9:30 Club. The newest part of it was the Black Cloud Tech Summit, powered by Amazon Web Services: two free days at the Eaton Hotel on AI, the cloud, Web3 and cybersecurity, made to give the next generation of Black women in tech, in Bond's words, "a true seat at the table."

The brief was a campaign line, a look and everything a hotel and a city need to find the summit, signed off by Black Girls Rock!, Amazon, AWS's inclusion, diversity and equity team and NOBEL Women, the national organization of Black women state legislators. Amazon's brand guidelines are long, precise and not open to interpretation, so we read them like a contract: how much room the logo gets, where the smile points, which orange is the orange. Every layout went past several people in every organization, more than once, in one weekend. Nothing went out that hadn't been checked against the book. Nothing went out late, either.

The idea was simple. If you're going to get your head in the cloud, the cloud should be real, so we made it out of paper. We built custom paper-like renderings of Amazon's headquarters, the Spheres in Seattle and the spiraling Helix designed for HQ2 in Arlington, and set them beside Washington's own skyline, the Capitol and its marble neighbors, all in the same white, folded, slightly soft-edged material, as if the whole skyline had been cut from one sheet. Amazon's world and the capital's, in one material, with the women of the campaign standing in front of it.

From there it went everywhere the summit needed to be: posters in three colorways, roll-ups for the halls, 8 by 8 ft step-and-repeat backdrops for the photos everyone actually posts, and a set of social posts that carried the summit's name. One line, one orange stripe, one paper skyline, and a lot of very good photos.

Three days, four organizations, two headquarters and one Capitol, cut from paper and cleared by every brand team involved. We'd love to say it was effortless. It wasn't. It just looks that way, which is the point.