The Australian team wasn’t the only winner in the Cricket World Cup, several printers produced work valued at six figure sums for the month-long event.
Melbourne firm Stadium Signs has printed internal MCG signage for decades and pumped out huge volumes for sponsor advertising and corporate suites at both the MCG and Docklands grounds.
The job included printing 1200sqm on banners for level one of the MCG alone, plus signs and banners for an activation in Federation Square for sponsor VB.
Once the jubilation of Australia’s victory wore off, Stadium Signs had three days to take it all down and put up AFL signage ready for the 2015 season.
[Related: Printing for other major sporting events]
Marrickville wide format printer Next Printing produced about 1000 flags to advertise the World Cup around Sydney, printing on 7000sqm of fabric in a massive short-turnaround job over Christmas.
General manger at Next, Romeo Sanuri, says the job, led by fabric division manager Julian Lowe, took four weeks to complete and was juggled with the company’s usual work.
He says the flags, which contained event branding and details about upcoming SCG matches, were printed on the Next Rhotex 322, the biggest fabric printer in Australia, which it installed last year.
“The machine is so fast that the printing part of the job was completed three times faster than it would have been with our older printers,” he says.
Sanuri says the bottleneck was instead the finishing, where almost 50km of thread was sewn to finish off the flags.
Lowe says it was the Rhotex’s first big event and it performed well. “Printing that much fabric in only 54 hours is fantastic and we are very happy with it,” he says.
“The games were better attended than expected and I think advertising like these flags helped raise awareness of the event, and improved the vibe of the city hosting a big tournament.”
AFI Branding produced thousands of flags, banners, signs, and bowheads for external branding at the MCG, Adelaide Oval and SCG in just two weeks in what was a ‘six-figure job’.
Managing director Glenn Watson says all the work was fabric, including 200sqm of sense mesh for each ground, except for some self-adhesive vinyl for pillar wraps.
“We have a long track record of handling big jobs on short notice for major events like the Commonwealth Games, Asian Cup, and World Championships, which we have built from day one of the business,” he says.
“That is why the organisers approached us and asked if we could be involved.”
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