For the 2018 Champions League Final, UEFA’s official tournament automotive partner Nissan created a robot called ‘Pitch-R’ – a spatial and sculptural football-focused brand installation and experience creator.
Territory: Global
Agency: TBWA\G1 Paris, UNIT9 London, Nissan Football Lab
Objectives
Nissan, an automotive brand focused on technology through its ‘Intelligent Mobility’ brand platform, sought to bring innovative technology to its official UEFA Champions League partnership to reach a global audience of grassroots football fans and enhance their experience of the tournament.
The objective behind the activation was to enhance the experience of football for players of any level, in any location around the world and the challenge for the brand and its marketing team was that technology and football don’t always mix well.
How did they overcome this?
By mixing them in an unexpected way through ‘Pitch-R’!
Activation
Nissan developed a smart, autonomous robot, called ‘Pitch-R, which was capable of creating a football pitch anywhere, anytime.
It was built to revolutionise the game of football around the world and was designed in collaboration with Nissan’s own Japanese designers and a team of European engineers.
Throughout the 2017-18 UEFA Champions League season, the group adapted Nissan’s own technology to be used in a football context through a combined technological team in Yokohama and a management team in Paris – while the actual product was developed in London.
User testing took place on the famous amateur football spaces at Hackney Marshes.
An EMLID GPS system enabled Pitch-R to calculate its precise positioning and then, once in place, the robot scanned the area, chose the appropriate pitch size (for five, seven or 11-a-side) and then sprayed down the lines.
The robot’s 4-ZED-camera system was able detect moving objects and brake automatically should anything cross its path, while line-detection technology and bespoke a ‘step-over’ system ensured avoiding stepping on freshly-painted lines.
Pitch-R was then officially launched on the grandest scale of all – at the 2018 UEFA Champions League Final in Kiev (the most watched annual sporting event worldwide with a global unique reach of 380 million viewers) – and formed the centrepiece of Nissan’s UEFA Champions League Final multi-platform activation.
Nissan Pitch R Case Film from UNIT9 on Vimeo.
Outcome
After its grand unveiling, Pitch-R was then moved across Europe: painting lines, creating new pitches, enabling news games of football and getting people talking about Nissan technology and football.
Pitch-R was the first innovation to come out of the ‘Nissan Football Lab’ – a global digital campaign showcasing the future of Nissan tech through the lens of football.
The auto brand hopes that the ‘Nissan Football Lab’ will lead to further football-led innovations in the future – all with the objective of innovating around the grassroots game worldwide.
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