Before: Over 35 million visitors come to Times Square every year. But while marketers' eyes were focused on the billboards above, the design team is thinking about all those people on the sidewalk.

The story of Hershey is larger than one chocolate bar. In the early 1900s, Milton Hershey created an entire town dedicated to chocolate making, a town where the streetlamps are shaped like Hershey’s Kisses.

Excitement that’s only an inch deep. Common, twenty-first century LED screens have replaced Times Square billboards that were once architectural wonders, seen no where else in the world. The design team aims to go back to the future by creating a physical experience in this hyper digital environment.

Not just another billboard – a story. The team imagines a chocolate factory on Times Square. As if Milton Hershey had started here and the company grew dizzily over the years, adding brand after brand.

“A 16-story cathedral of merriment and wonder” is how one observer described the new Hershey’s store. In a digital age, when “spectacular” means anybody’s ad on a giant screen, the Times Square chocolate factory is a throwback to the days of giant coffee cups and signs with a million blinking bulbs.

Close up, the site is an even more exuberant expression of Hershey brands. Amazing machinery clanks and spins. Stacks modeled on the original Hershey factory puff live steam. One Times Square sign maker told the designers, “We haven’t made lights like these in 40 years!”

The past is present in this twenty-first century identity for the Hershey’s store. Like a team of archeologists, the designers sifted through the company’s lore to find the elements to create a new brand mark.

Inside the store, reflective surfaces bounce light everywhere to make brands pop and create a sense of space in a very small retail footprint. The Reese’s display is designed to appear as the base of one of the chocolate factory’s smokestacks.

The famous Hershey’s Kisses plume rotates, funneling attention down to the Kisses products below. Outside, another Kisses plume runs around the facade. Visitors can use a terminal in the store to put their messages to the world in lights.

By turning control wheels on “The Original Hershey Automatic Gravitational Chocolate Machine,” kids can create their own mix of favorites. The products clatter down chutes and into buckets that visitors can take home.

Brand “telegraphy” reduces strong brands to their essentials so people can experience them in new ways. In Hershey’s case, this means telegraphing an entire portfolio at once and transforming intellectual property like brand marks into new, physical products like these mugs.

These shopping bags convey the message that Hershey’s wanted to send with a Times Square billboard. But no ad could have created the indelible memories of a chocolate factory. Or filled the bags with products sold at a profit. Or spent the rest of the day walking around the city before flying home.

Around the time the Hershey’s store opened on Times Square, business leaders began to understand the importance of “experiential marketing” – where the experience comes first and press is the advertising.