I recently had the pleasure of spending some of my well-earned leave at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa last month. Those close to me have regarded me as a football tragic for many years, mainly because I was known to arrive at school/university/work bleeding from the eyes having risen at 2am to watch an obscure cup tie between a team from Romania and a rivals from Ukraine.
But even though the trip to South Africa was my own pilgrimage to Mecca, the printing world was never far from my thoughts, primarily because advertisers wouldn’t allow it to be.
These days, the World Cup is not just a festival of football and culture, but of advertising. With the world’s biggest sporting event dominating water-cooler discussions worldwide, every company with a brand to support wants to have the ad that everyone talks about.
Marketing war
Nike and Adidas are famous for trying to outdo each other with television spots that have grown to an epic scale (anyone who missed Nike’s three-and-a-half minute ‘Write History’ ad should do themselves a favour and hit it up on YouTube now. Right now. I’ll wait here).
Printers get drawn into the game too. You may have read about or seen the six-metre high replica Adidas soccer ball which featured outside Crown Towers in Melbourne for the duration of the Cup. Local printer Fleeting Image printed the vinyl wrap for the ball, in what was probably the nation’s most famous bit of soccer-related print that week.
In South Africa, one of the great billboards was in the host city of Polokwane promoting local telco MTN, which featured a man blowing a vuvuzuela stretching across a highway overpass.
The fans get in on the act too. At least two of the games I attended saw the unveiling of banners that covered entire sections of the stadia (including one promoting Christianity forewarning that “Every tongue will confess”).
It seems the World Cup of football was also the World Cup of large-format. Indeed, the bar seems to get set a little higher with every major tournament. For the 2006 World Cup in Germany, Adidas commissioned an extraordinary wrap for a freeway overpass near Munich Airport, which featured an image of German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn stretching over the curved bridge to save a ball. The feat of creativity and engineering was so remarkable that images of the wrap became a viral sensation, pinging into email inboxes worldwide.
Arguably, the sporting equipment company went one better two years later, producing a 138-foot tall image of Czech goalkeeper Petr Cech and placing it on the Prater Park ferris wheel in Vienna as part of the 2008 European Championships. The ad, which went on to win the Golden Drum for Design and Art Direction, used the spokes of the giant wheel to depict the goalkeeper with eight rotating arms.
A simple Google Images search can be used to find pictures of these works. They’re worth checking out, as they’re a powerful example of how major companies still use the power of creative print to stand out from the crowd.
Daniel Fitzgerald is a reporter for ProPrint
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