A Fashionable Crowd Arrives at Shanghai Railway Station

Starting in November 2015, more than 3,000 employees from WPP's 26 Shanghai companies moved, batch by batch, into Dabang Collaboration Plaza on Hengfeng Road, near Shanghai Railway Station. That is no small thing.

To say goodbye, Wang Pianpian and a few colleagues had lunch at Dongjia Xiaoguan, a restaurant near their office. It sits on Julu Road, in a pleasant neighborhood of quiet, artsy streets, next to the busier main road, Changshu Road. If you set out to try every place nearby for lunch, you could go a week without repeating a meal.

Mention Dongjia Xiaoguan, and her first reaction is: "You have to order the drunken crab."

Wang works at GroupM. December 11, 2015 was her last day at Century Trade Plaza; soon she would move to Dabang Collaboration Plaza, near Shanghai Railway Station. For the staff of GroupM, and of all WPP's Shanghai companies, the move was a big event.

WPP is the world's largest communications group, and it grew to its present size through large acquisitions (as, for that matter, did the whole advertising and communications industry). The most important and best-known deal in its history was Ogilvy. In those days WPP (short for Wire & Plastic Products Group) was, to Ogilvy and its founder David Ogilvy, nothing less than the "barbarians at the gate." The two sides later made peace, but financial dealmaking has stayed in the company's DNA.

Today the giant owns more than 60 advertising companies, with clients such as BMW, Shell and Cisco, all Fortune 500 members. In fiscal 2014, WPP's billings reached US$76 billion and its revenue US$19 billion.

Next to the move, though, all of that can wait. The word most closely tied to moving is vanity, or, to put it more kindly, a change of lifestyle.

If you have watched Mad Men, you know that names such as Ogilvy and J. Walter Thompson belong with places like New York's Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue. People don't talk about the show's 1960s retro look for nothing. Advertising people have always had to dress themselves up; that is how they prove they speak for whatever is fresh, creative and on-trend. It is the same reason banks tend to occupy tall, solemn buildings: they have to persuade everyone to hand over their life savings. Advertising needs clients to put their faith in it. The office, its address and the people who work there all have to look as if they can't be beaten.

Wang's new office is at 399 Hengfeng Road, in a 33-story tower named "Dabang Collaboration Plaza." From late November 2015, more than 3,000 employees of WPP's 26 Shanghai companies moved here from other buildings, filling 20 of its floors. No, not the whole building, but three giant letters, WPP, already hang at the top. On a clear day you can see them from "old Jing'an," around Taixing Road, for instance.

That description is a little vague. If you have to tell someone where you've moved, the easiest landmark is "Shanghai Railway Station." According to a phone map, Dabang Collaboration Plaza is 760 meters from the station, an 11-minute walk.

Compared with those "quiet, artsy little streets," the area around the station is certainly messier. Put bluntly, it isn't as "upscale."

Metro Lines 1, 3 and 4 meet here. If you take Line 3 or 4 to work, you pass through a corridor lined with stalls selling magazines such as Story Collection and Zhiyin, under signs reading "Bodhi Vajra Sandalwood Prayer Beads." On the walk from the metro exit to Dabang Collaboration Plaza, a man with a megaphone announces, "Just raise a hand, just give us a sign, and our gifts will turn up everywhere," then tosses phone accessories and other freebies into the crowd.

The passage from Line 1 to Lines 3 and 4

There is some small-scale construction nearby as well. Before the 2016 Spring Festival travel rush begins, the station concourse will finish a round of expansion, part of a wider renovation of the area around Shanghai Railway Station.

Before WPP moved, the social media outlet Social Beta published an article that flooded the Moments feeds of many people at the companies. Among the 200-odd comments were these: "I really want to sell boxed lunches over there, I'd get rich," "I hope the aunties on the square do ballroom dancing like the ones at Century Trade Plaza," and "I'll moonlight applying screen protectors at lunch, life is hard." And because several ad agencies would share one building, "we'll all be running into our exes, and our exes' exes."

All of these remarks rest on one assumption: whatever the railway station looks like today, many people still hold only their first impression of it. In a city like Shanghai, life really is split into pieces. The areas you frequent decide how you see the city. The station used to belong to Zhabei District, while Wang's old office was in Jing'an District. In old Shanghai parlance, Jing'an was the "upper corner," a district for the wealthy, a term that originally meant the part of the old foreign concessions where compradors and celebrities gathered. Zhabei was the "lower corner."

These advertising people don't think of themselves as part of the "lower corner." Until now, almost all of Shanghai's large ad agencies clustered around busy Huaihai Road and Nanjing Road. They had to be near their big clients.

A WeChat official account called "Ogilvy Red Village," in an article titled Year-End, and We Want to Make Some Big News, described life after the move: "someone loses a phone every day," "someone gets an upset stomach every day," "business at Starbucks suddenly picked up," and "everyone has noticed that prices are lower."

But just as the move was being prepared, on November 4, 2015, Shanghai announced that Jing'an and Zhabei districts would merge into a new "Jing'an District."

He Bin, an associate director at Burson-Marsteller, said that after the news broke, "people's mood started with a little disappointment and then slowly picked up."

Shanghai Railway Station seen from the building

Burson-Marsteller was the first company to move in. On her first day, associate director Shu Ping went to lunch with colleagues at the food court in the basement of the Pacific Department Store across the street. Compared with K11, near her old office, she found it much cheaper. "Over there a meal averaged about 50 yuan; now 20 or 30 is enough." They were still exploring, curious about the place.

Takeout, however, remained the most common choice. The easiest way to keep up the old routine is to go downstairs and buy a boxed lunch from a nearby FamilyMart or Lawson. Nic Hu, who works at Blue Hive, sometimes handles lunch this way, or drives somewhere else to eat. Half of Blue Hive's staff are foreigners. "They all order delivery or go to Wagas across the street," Nic Hu said.

For Nic Hu, one benefit of the new location is that her drive home is no longer jammed. When she worked at Century Trade Plaza, Changle Road showed up on the map as a red line at rush hour; now she leaves from Hengfeng Road and takes Changshou Road home, and the problem is gone. At first, parking in the garage under the building was free; charges began on January 1.

Burson-Marsteller held a celebration when it first moved in

J. Walter Thompson's former Shanghai office, packed up for the move

Planning for the building's layout and design began in 2014.

Shu Ping, the Burson-Marsteller associate director, represented her company in choosing and negotiating with fit-out firms. "At the time, seven top fit-out firms helped us choose. They gathered all our admin and HR people and took us to WPP's whole center," Shu said. The firms included JLL, Haworth, Steelcase and PDM Design, among others. Burson-Marsteller is on the 29th floor, Ogilvy on the 9th, and Wang's GroupM on floors 17 to 23; each company's fit-out and design style may differ.

The first task in preparing the move was assigning floors. Every company had its own needs, and some were competitors; that alone took two to three months.

Once they moved in, many people found the building's design novel and pleasing. "There's a dedicated smoking room, which I'm quite happy about," Wang said. At Century Trade Plaza, smokers had to go to the stairwell.

The building also has a nursing room, smoking areas, open spaces, an outdoor garden, and meeting rooms of every size with playful names; at Wang's company, for example, there are rooms called "Green Lantern" and "Batcave." Staff have been discovering the building's hidden tricks, such as meeting rooms that can be split in two or joined into one.

OLA & RESTAURANT, the coffee bar on the sixth floor of Dabang Collaboration Plaza

The offices are also somewhat larger. For Chirantan Ray, managing director of Millward Brown's Shanghai branch, the design feature he likes best is the open space. Their old office in the Celebrity Business Building was mostly partitioned, and senior staff had small private offices. "Now 3,000 people work here at the same time, open to everyone, and we need more collaboration, too." Dabang Collaboration Plaza is one of the largest co-location projects in the group's history.

Inside Millward Brown's office, which puts more emphasis on "open space"

Dabang came out of an agreement signed by WPP, Nan Fung Group and Baokuang Group. The companies moving in will bring revenue to the former Zhabei District. The former Jing'an District covered 7.62 square kilometers and the former Zhabei 29.75; the first had run out of room to develop, while the second still has plenty of potential through land sales. "Zhabei, from Suzhou Creek out past the Middle Ring Road, will have loads of land to sell. Its prospects are a gold mine," Zhang Zhaodong, a project manager at a real estate fund, wrote on Zhihu. His verdict: "Jing'an is clinging to Zhabei's coattails."

Zhang had earlier taken over a project in the former Zhabei District that resembles Dabang and also coincided with the Jing'an–Zhabei merger: a mixed-use complex at the intersection of Hutai Road and Jincheng Road, with 140,000 square meters of retail and 48,000 square meters of offices. Office projects there can only be sold as whole buildings, which is much harder than selling by floor or by unit, and Zhang thinks restrictions like this have kept office sales lukewarm. "After Jing'an and Zhabei merged, interest rose somewhat, which should be one sign of the merger's benefits."

Within a month of the merger, the average transaction price of homes in the former Zhabei District rose by 8,000 yuan per square meter, pushing prices above those in Xuhui and Hongkou districts; near the station, homes at Suhe Rongcheng now average 70,000 yuan per square meter. Another factor is driving prices up: after the merger, junior high school students can apply to high schools in both former districts, which directly improves their odds of getting in.

The government wants the area to become Shanghai's "new Jing'an," and a renovated Shanghai Railway Station to become a new gateway landmark for the city. To that end, Shanghai held a nine-month "International University Student Urban Design Competition for the Shanghai Railway Station Area." Harvard University, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, MIT, Tongji University and others took part, and Harvard won. Its team proposed a commercial public pedestrian corridor 1.7 kilometers long and 60 meters wide, an idea that will serve as one reference for the renovation plan.

Redeveloping an old district like this brings to mind places such as Pennsylvania Station in the United States. In the late 19th century, the area was considered the "darkest, dirtiest heart" of New York. Since the Civil War it has gone through four rounds of redevelopment (though demolishing the old station became a disgrace in architectural history), and today it is New York's front door. Another well-known example is New York's Grand Central Terminal, where Apple opened its largest store in the world when the station turned 100.

Pennsylvania Station. Image from Wikipedia

Grand Central Terminal, New York. Image from Wikipedia

Now the renovation of the Shanghai Railway Station area in Zhabei is on the agenda. Around it, along Suzhou Creek, Tianmu West Road, Hengfeng Road and elsewhere, more high-end complexes will go up, more companies and shops will move in, and prices will slowly rise. Ideally, the "lower corner" will gradually disappear.

Speaking of advertising, Franklin Roosevelt is said to have remarked, "If I weren't president, I'd be an ad man." In his day, advertising was a conspicuous engine of economic recovery and a sought-after profession; ad people had enviable jobs and status, "fashionable" and "cosmopolitan." Those labels no longer fit the industry. Talk of upheaval has gone on for years: digital media is eating into traditional advertising, and the threat to the traditional ad people WPP represents comes from tech-savvy internet companies such as Facebook and Google, from innovative agencies, and from the much-discussed push toward "disintermediation." Faced with new technologies and platforms, ad people, who of all people ought to sense change first, also feel somewhat out of their depth.

That upheaval, not their new surroundings, is what they really have to face. Next to it, moving to an old district under renovation is hardly a big deal.

After two days of working from home in between, Wang Pianpian moved into the new building on December 16, among the last group to leave Century Trade Plaza. The company had already run moving training: everyone packed their belongings into boxes. Each box carried a label whose color stood for a floor, with a name and seat number written on it. Hers was No. 98, her desk number on the 22nd floor of Dabang Collaboration Plaza. When she arrived at work that day, the box was waiting beside her seat.

Besides a meal at a nearby restaurant, the Starbucks at Century Trade Plaza became part of many people's farewell posts on Moments, and some photographed the piano opposite it. On the Friday before Wang and her colleagues finished moving, the piece played at the lunchtime performance happened to be How Can I Help Thinking of Her.

Cover image sources: m.yinews.cn, www.pinterest.com