Loving the start of Wimbledon this week, as ever, and as players descend on SW19, all sorts of fun advertising begins to emerge. Already, on day 1 of the Tournament, three different Wimbledon-associated companies have made their mark.
A big favourite of mine from last year was the Evian outdoor campaign (sorry folks, couldn’t find an image online anywhere annoyingly…) that turned their well-known mountain logo into upside-down strawberries drizzled with cream. Simple but oh-so effective. This year, parent company Danone have apparently gone all out in an effort to make Evian synonymous with British tennis, spending no less than £3m on marketing activity throughout the two-week tournament.
This year, their activity includes strong national print and outdoor billboard ads bringing to life their ‘Live Young’ strap-line (above), cute on-pack visuals featuring pink Evian-branded tennis balls, and a huge digital CBS outdoor campaign. Selected outdoor sites will showcase photographs from the day’s action at Wimbledon every evening of the tennis tournament. Over the next two weeks, the Evian activity planned by MEC and bought by Kinetic, will also include ads on the London Underground digital escalator panels (DEPs), when the temperature reaches 25 degrees.
Day-part campaigns on cross-track projectors (XTP) will target morning and evening commuters in the West End. In the morning, XTP screens will show images from Wimbledon, provided by Getty Images, but in the evenings the screens will show “Today at Wimbledon…” with display highlights from that day’s play. Very cool.
As ever, tennis fashion hits the headlines with the inevitable kit unveils from the leading names (Murray’s Fred Perry and Federer’s Nike to name a couple). And having already shared the love for Ralph Lauren’s marriage with tennis this season, I have to include their print campaign here too:
One word: classic. And doesn’t it make you want to summer in the Hamptons?
Finally, one more print campaign that caught my eye today amongst the pages and pages of Wimbledon supplements is from a brand, about whose marketing activities I may have been somewhat scathing in the past. That is Highland Spring, sponsor of Andy Murrayand obviously rival brand to tournament sponsor, Evian. Highland Spring’s clean, fresh, simplistic approach focusing on the British No.1 is arresting in its clarity – not a bad effect for a water brand to have.
While the war for the trophy is fought on court, may the battle of the brands commence.
