Adidas is the official FIFA partner at the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, the other sports brands, namely Nike and Puma, get mileage on the field through the sponsoring of the different national teams. The battle for our attention by these brands is always ferocious and has inspired some of the most innovative and daring guerilla marketing the world has seen over the last few years. While Adidas dominates anything FIFA-related for this World Cup™, Nike has been pushing aggressively and this is most evident with their massive advertising installations in Johannesburg city.
They have created a massive interactive installation on Johannesburg’s fourth tallest building, the 30-story, 138 metre Life Centre, between tall images of Cristiano Ronaldo and Robinho. The interactive LED screen is about the size of half a football field and enables football fans to submit personal messages to their favourite players and have these broadcast for the city to see, between 6pm and 6am every day. It is the largest interactive LED screen in Africa at 44m high by 42w and is made of 207,520 individual LEDs. You can send messages in 12 languages, namely: Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish & Turkish; and expect an upload time of anything from 20 minutes to 24 hours.
“Fans can submit a 57 character personal message through Facebook.com, nikefootball.com, Twitter, Facebook, Mxit (South Africa) and QQ (China) to over 50 of Nike’s athletes from around the world. Up to 100 headlines are then selected each night and transformed into digital player animations that are projected across Johannesburg. When a fan’s message is used they receive a personalised notification showing them a picture of the headline and the animation created from it.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvAttzUzEro
To create your headline on twitter, tweet #NikeFuture and to see the headlines online, check out Nike Football or NikeFuture.