Wednesday 21 Jun 2006
The media is saturated with football-related advertising, and it reaches fever pitch when the big summer tournaments kick off. Digit investigated how the creative industry handles the world’s big events.
It’s meant to be about football, but you’d be forgiven for thinking this year’s FIFA tournament in Germany is the advertising World Cup. Big fish corporations and minnows alike will clash on TV screens, phones, billboards, and Web pages, all aiming for consumer loyalty and brand awareness through the universal language of football.
“Event-related design is always an interesting challenge,” says Charles O’Neil, senior project manager at Tribal DDB. “An event like the World Cup creates an incredibly crowded media landscape with everyone wanting to advertise, whether they’re sponsors or not.
“The challenge becomes how to make your work stand out from the crowd. You have to make your work more aesthetically appealing and more engaging.”
Working with an official partner or sponsor helps enormously with getting the campaign noticed. Tribal DDB is working with Philips – supplier of lighting and AV equipment to the tournament.
“Official sponsors are able to offer you more access to football-related material and resources than you would otherwise have,” says O’Neil. It’s important to make sure you make the most of this advantage.
“One of the major challenges working with an official sponsor is to make sure we leverage that sponsorship and use the assets of the FIFA World Cup to stand out from the crowd,” says O’Neil.
“The number of companies marketing through football at this time is huge – the key is to take advantage of the Official Sponsorship status to bring added value for the user.”
Bloc Media has worked with FIFA itself on numerous products, including the FIFA World Cup game and the FIFA Interactive World Cup – a joint venture between FIFA, Microsoft, and EA.
“Such event-related design is treated in much the same way as any other design job,” says John Denton, creative director at the company. “First and foremost you take the expectations and goals of your client and start to work out the best approach for the job at hand. The key difference with design for events is that you must produce something that has its own creative ideals while often maintaining the concerns of several other parties.”
Tactical battle
There are challenges in all creative projects, but designing with the football scene in mind has its unique issues. “The hard thing with football is that we are all at saturation point with football images – newspaper coverage, Beckham, and every shop in the land using football and the St George’s Cross flag to sell their wares,” says Oli Christie, creative director at Inbox Digital.
“So having a big idea or great design to create a point of difference is the key – Nike has always done this well.”
You have to make sure that your work doesn’t provoke the “oh god, not another bloody viral football game” response. This was exactly the problem facing Christie’s team at Inbox Digital, who created a viral for online bookmaker Stan James (see right).
“To create unique football games that will be different and worth playing is really hard,” says Christie. “And if it’s bad, it really won’t go viral, whatever the brand.”
Penalty points
An event with the size and profile of the World Cup means that the designer has many different factions to please. John Denton says there are many layers of secondary and tertiary sponsorships and approvals to manage.
“Such restraints can’t be overcome, so it’s really essential to make sure that all the key parties’ limitations for usage and any specific criteria are known from the outset,” he says.
Denton says this process is sometimes difficult to clarify. “With something like the World Cup it can get quite complicated. There are specific players who should and shouldn’t be used. There are sponsors and sub-sponsors, and individual teams’ branding and logos.
“All of this means that we need to be very mindful when choosing what assets ought to be employed. Perhaps more than with other clients, the most successful approach is often the more basic, stripped-down one as it helps free us from falling into any legal or branding pitfalls.”
FIFA itself is a highly regulated brand with stringent guidelines that must be observed – a quick trawl through the marketing rules on the organization’s Web site is a dizzying experience.
“It’s been a case of making sure we understand FIFA’s guidelines properly, especially in relation to the Philips brand guidelines,” says Charles O’Neil.
“Then it’s a case of working out what will work. If you can develop the relationship so that they trust you, then you can start to produce really wonderful things.”
“Working within a brand can obviously be seen as restrictive,” agrees Chris Brown. “However, a good designer will always look for the positive aspects within such a project. Colour palettes, corporate logos, and fonts are generally decided already, so there is a firm base on which to begin construction.
“As a designer it is good to set parameters – a project that is comprised of elements that I need to stick to helps me to stay concise and adhere to the brief.”
International debut
There are other key pitfalls when designing work of this kind. “Perhaps one of the biggest is forgetting to put the user – in this case, the fan – front and centre,” says Charles O’Neil.
“Everything you are doing should work towards enhancing the fan’s overall experience of the event. If it isn’t working in this way, then it runs the risk of simply becoming generic football clutter.”
The international nature of the tournament can lay traps for the unwary. “Any humour or cultural reference needs to be closely scrutinized to make sure we don’t end up with a product that alienates or antagonizes any specific group,” says John Denton.
“Our approach has been to balance the sense of competition and rivalry with the broader celebration of the game that the World Cup represents.”
Fever pitch
“The World Cup, while clearly having old national rivalries, is very easy to portray as essentially very good-humoured and inclusive,” continues Denton. “It gives us the rare scope to not have to localize everything, as mixed language content actually helps bolster this international flavour.”
Charles O’Neil says official sponsorship status is about more than offering the consumer cooler assets – if handled well, it can also give the brand credibilty.
“So often you see sponsorship-related marketing material that looks exactly like what it is – sponsorshiprelated marketing material,” he says.
“It doesn’t manage to bridge the gap as to why that particular brand is involved in that event, leaving the brand looking like a big corporation who just wanted their logo on the billboards in the arena. Its involvement in the sport doesn’t look credible.”
The deluge of football-related marketing hanging on the coat-tails of the summer’s tournament means that the beautiful game will be unavoidable over the next month or so.
“Everyone suffers World Cup fever to some extent,” says John Denton. “Even if it’s in hating it! It can’t be underestimated how passionate people are about the World Cup.”
High passions can mean pressure on the creative to create perfect work, but the level of interest can make the creative’s job easier. “The source material is subject to such passion that it’s more a matter of reigning it in than squeezing it out,” says Denton.
“Having worked with FIFA a number of times, we now understand that its main concern is in presenting the game in the best possible light. When it comes to the World Cup this is a bit of a shoe-in as the whole event is a very positive and global experience.”
And it’s only natural that clients want to tap into this sudden surge in interest and positivity. “I would say that clients don’t suffer from World Cup fever any more than the rest of us,” says O’Neil.
“Everyone wants to do absolutely their best work for the FIFA World Cup. The work is directly competing against everybody else’s on the world stage... so who can blame them if they get a bit feverish?”
Case study: 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany
URL: www.mydreamfinal.com
Client: EA Games
Design: Bloc Media, www.blocmedia.com
Bloc Media was tasked with finding a way to extend the use of filmed assets from the 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany from Electronic Arts, and incorporate them into a broader, more user-led Web experience to promote the game.
“The Web site was intended to be a very intuitive and simple experience,” says Bloc creative director John Denton.
“As it had an incredibly wide potential audience we avoided making anything too Webcentric and focused more on delivering something that fans could interact with and make their own content, relevant to their affiliations.
“The design itself was intended to engage the audience very much on their level. It wasn’t about being ‘sexy’ or ‘edgy’, it was about being authentic and personal. The hand-drawn elements were used to keep things on a human scale rather than something overly grandiose.”
Flash 8, After Effects, and Photoshop were used to offer viewers the World Cup dreams of a host of passionate fans and then create their own version of the overriding campaign message of “My Dream FIFA World Cup Final”.
“Aside from the usual technical hurdles with getting this type of interactive piece working, the main challenge was to balance all the various requirements of the client with those of FIFA,” says Denton.
“The key to achieving this has been allowing time for the various levels of feedback and approval, and of course to try and pre-empt amendments. Finding somewhere to fit all the legals for such massive joint ventures is also a project in itself.”
Case study: Mobile MatchCast
URL: www.fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
Client: Yahoo!
Design: Everypoint, www.everypoint.com
“As a design project, the official FIFA World Cup resources will span various mediums, from print, through online to mobile, and all must adhere to an identical brand bible,” says Chris Brown, art director at Everypoint.
Brown’s agency was tasked with creating the Yahoo! Mobile Matchcast – a downloadable application that will run on virtually every new Java handset. Users are able to access realtime tournament information.
“Catching the fleeting visual stimuli that is associated with a game inspired the look of the project – the curves of the stadium, the play of lights, and the colour palette,” says Brown.
“These are all drawn together in the initial designs. The challenge was translating the grandeur and the spectacle of the World Cup down to a 4-x-5cm screen.”
Everypoint’s patent vector graphics platform was used to accomplish this task for Brown’s design team. “Vector graphics on a mobile screen deliver a critical requirement – clean lines that delineate a design, and allow for crisp animation,” says Brown.
“In essence, the experience we are able to deliver on the mobile is now equivalent to animation in Flash on the Web.
“Whenever you’re creating for substantial entities like FIFA and Yahoo!, there is a degree more pressure, and a lot more challenges,” says Brown.
“That said, as an artist, the returns are enormous – millions are expected to download and use the mobile data service during the tournament. Having your designs seen and enjoyed by such an extensive audience is incredibly rewarding.”
Case study: The Big Picture
Client: Umbro Global
URL: www.umbro.com
Design: Swamp, www.swampme.com
“The World Cup is such an important event, especially when you’re Umbro’s target audience bracket of 16-18- year-olds,” says Andrew Brown, creative director of Swamp. “No matter where you are in the world, you’re at a really exciting age, and this party only happens once every four years.”
Swamp developed The Big Picture, a mechanism to capture the World Cup 2006 as a ‘moment in time’ on Umbro.com, and show how it was experienced by the youth all over the world.
“We’ve got a real global community perspective,” said Brown. The Big Picture is a place where all the contributed photos are processed to create a photo-mosaic. Behind each photo is a MySpace-style mini-blog.
“Design-wise we’ve got a pretty flexible playing area – we can expand the site vertically and horizontally – so we can utilize space on big monitors and shrink down to accommodate the smaller resolutions,” says Brown.
“It’s kind of liquid layout in Flash 8 without using scaling. Because we’re dealing with a young target audience we can be a bit higher spec.”
When you’re creating multilingual sites, especially in Flash, the various spaces words take up can cause problems. “One of the ways we’ve overcome this with the new site was to put all three languages on screen at once, so with the titles you often see it written in Chinese, then English, then Spanish,” says Brown.
“Apart from anything else this makes it look really cool, but from a branding perspective it gives the site a really international feel, so we get the messages across that Umbro is a global brand.”
Michael Burns
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