The Dentsu Beach House at the 2023 Cannes Lions was designed to provide delegates and potential business partners with a comfortable and stylish venue in which to meet with — and learn from — their peers. With many companies competing for attention on the beach, we needed a standout venue design that would showcase our identity as an agency network with roots in Japan and growth opportunities worldwide.

We chose bonsai as a visual motif for the venue because it is a traditional Japanese art form that harnesses the human creative impulse and uses it to shape the life force of a tree, guiding it to grow in beautiful and unexpected new ways. In much the same way, Dentsu creators harness their passion and ambition, nurturing the growth of new ideas and shaping them into effective and innovative communication tools. Continuously seeking the unknown, exploring various possibilities and stretching to reach visionary goals, our ambitious creativity is like an evergreen bonsai that grows without limit in all directions.

Our artwork uses dense, spiraling lines to represent not only the growing trunk and branches of a bonsai tree, but also the living continuum of creative ideation. The leaves that grow thickly in places are rendered with the human touch of textured brushstrokes, and as the branches twist and turn to conform to the venue wall surface they evoke the often convoluted journey that must be taken to reach an ideal creative end. The same concept is reflected in our motion graphics, where the speed of the branches' growth quickens and slows with the variegated rhythms of the human thought process.

The Dentsu Beach House attracted some 1,500 visitors over five days of events at the 2023 Cannes Lions, which was double the number of attendees recorded in 2022. Meeting room facilities at the bonsai-themed venue were also in high demand, with over 200 on-site bookings for discussions with clients, business partners and other agency stakeholders.