Brand Environment · Creative Direction
A familiar cultural association became the starting point for a more contemporary guest journey at CinemaCon.
Format
Brand Environment · Trade Activation
Context
CinemaCon 2026 · Caesars Palace, Las Vegas
My role
Lead Creative Strategist · Creative Direction
CinemaCon 2026 · Caesars Palace, Las Vegas
What I owned
Creative direction and the Always Refreshing narrative that tied every zone together.
What it guided
The sequence guests moved through, starting at the marquee entrance, and the visual language at each step.
Who used it
A graphic designer and a 3D designer, who built the environment and its graphics from it.
Team
Lead creative strategist on a three-person creative team.
Guests had to recognize the brand before they would accept a new version of it, because familiarity earns permission to change.
Coca-Cola has been part of moviegoing for as long as moviegoing has been a cultural ritual. At CinemaCon 2026, in front of the theatre owners, studio executives, and partners shaping where cinema goes next, that history needed to point forward. The question: how do you honor a century of cultural association without becoming a museum of it?
Hospitality seating carries the brand’s cues into a space built for lingering and conversation.
Guests arrived through one recognizable cue and moved through spaces that felt more contemporary with every step.
A lit marquee crowns the entrance: one familiar gesture before the transition. Beneath it, a portal shaped like the curve of a Coca-Cola bottle, lined with an effervescent bubble texture, frames the centerpiece bottle as guests approach. Genre-forward posters reinterpret brand cues through a modern editorial lens, and the concession counter at the back closes the visit with hospitality.
The space moved people through an argument about what moviegoing becomes next.
Honor legacy with restraint.
Heritage works as an anchor. One marquee welcomes guests, and everything past it speaks in a contemporary voice.
Design with modern cinematic language.
Clean materials, contemporary layouts, and elevated hospitality cues place Coca-Cola in the premium theater of today.
Let the entrance become the brand.
The portal takes the curve of a Coca-Cola bottle and fills it with bubbles, so guests step through the product before they reach it.
Carry one story across the experience.
Always Refreshing gave every zone a shared direction, from the first step under the marquee to the concession counter at the back.
After the first concept round, Coca-Cola asked for an entrance that felt more like the brand itself. The marquee and the single heritage cue stayed. The portal took on the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle, with an interior that reads as bubbles, and now frames the centerpiece as guests approach.
One question unified every environment: What does it feel like when a brand that belongs to cinema's past actively leads its future?
Experience architecture · Recognize → Reinterpret → Reimagine · Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, 2026
Coca-Cola honors cinema's legacy and actively leads the next era of moviegoing.
The environment made an argument.
CinemaCon's audience builds and operates the spaces where cinema happens, and they recognize high-quality hospitality, pacing, and environmental design immediately. The Coca-Cola environment earned attention through coherence: every decision reinforced the same idea.