CASE STUDY
Super Bowl LVII was set to take place on February 12th, 2023 in Glendale, Arizona and Nike wanted to bring the big game to two of their nearby retail stores. The project kicked off with an all-team meeting and VC (visual center) presentation supplied by the client, containing the brand colors, textures, and overall activation feel. Using the VC to ground our work, we were asked to ideate impactful creative that would highlight their product and draw customers into their stores. We had just one month to design, engineer, print, fabricate, ship, and install retail activation graphics that would be seen by thousands of consumers throughout the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl.
Our design team huddled up and began brainstorming while one of our engineers flew down to Arizona to conduct site surveys and capture photos of the Glendale and Desert Ridge stores. While Nike was our official client, the NFL was another key player, providing design guard rails, feedback, and approvals alongside Nike throughout the project. We worked with both Nike and the NFL to ensure the creative followed both companies’ brand guidelines and adapted as we learned of additional design requirements, including adhering to the NFL’s “Safety Zone” two weeks into the project – we had to remove the Super Bowl lockup from all exterior graphic designs at the Glendale location because it was within a 10-mile radius of the stadium.
Design dreamed up a slew of branded graphic components: exterior window and floor graphics, an interior floor graphic the length of the store, hanging banners, metal merchandising fixtures with graphic inserts and lightbox backers, mannequin platforms with mirrored backers and museum case toppers, vinyl athlete graphics, a footwear wall cladded in custom turf with an embedded acrylic back-lit logo, a freestanding dimensional logo lightbox cladded in mirror, an 11.5’ monument wrapped in vinyl with a dimensional mirror logo, 15’ painted PVC pipes as the goal posts, an overhead acrylic grid printed with football field lines, styrene platform wraps, and a 8-foot-wide back-lit LVII display. Once both Nike and the NFL approved the creative, engineering took the lead mapping out the logistics needed to bring everything to life.
After our design department pitched and received approval for an internal floor graphic the length of the entire store, we turned to our in-house material experts. Their task was to identify a heavy-duty material that could withstand extremely high foot traffic but wouldn’t damage the polished concrete floor upon removal. The winner was a non-slip laminated silicone-based material that did indeed stand the test of time (and 20,000+ shoes!).
Our whole shop came together to produce the graphic and display elements in record time. Then, once everything was prepped, packaged and shipped, the account director, lead project manager, 3D engineering manager and our entire installation team all flew out to install both store activations.
The Nike super bowl campaign graphics were live for just 13 days, and in that short timeframe, tens of thousands of consumers walked across our floor graphics and shopped in the initiative zones. The standout feature of the pinnacle location was the centerpiece back-lit LVII display, with customers lining up to take photos in front of it. Nike’s very own CEO even stopped by the Glendale location – his first time ever visiting a Nike Value Store. After five years designing super bowl displays for Nike retail stores, this one’s going to be hard to top!
Ready to get started on your next retail activation? Want to learn more about our services? Hand us a napkin sketch or a full-fledged retail campaign. We’ll bring your project to life!
