Nike Zoom Mercurial activation

To launch the new Nike Zoom Mercurial football boot, Nike held a launch event at Ultra Football's flagship store in Abbotsford. The centrepiece of the event was a women's 4x4 Winner stays on tournament, featuring local football teams.

Nike engaged Tundra to create a series of game screens and leaderboards to display at the event, along with a control interface to help the Nike event team score the game and trigger the screens.

Out of home campaign assets

To promote the event ahead of time, we worked with Nike to create campaign assets featuring Nike Athlete Sam Kerr. This included OOH billboards at iconic Melbourne locations such as Punt Road and Kings Way.

Following the event, we also created digital assets for Nike’s eDM and App recap articles.

Pitch screens

Ultra Football’s flagship store in Abbotsford features an indoor football pitch, surrounded by digital billboard screens. As part of the event, we created a series of assets to be displayed on this screen, promoting the Nike Zoom Mercurial boot, and featuring clips of Sam Kerr training in the boot. The design of these assets took into account the placement of each screen in the event, with unique assets for the left, middle, and right screens to create a truly immersive experience for spectators.

Event leaderboard and scoring app

To bring the 4 x 4 tournament to life, Tundra created a control interface app that would allow the Nike team to score games, and have the results be reflected in the leaderboard screens displayed around the Ultra store.

The tournament was composed of three minute games, with the first team to score two goals moving on to the next round. The screens had two states: ‘during game’, and ‘end of game’. In the ‘during game’ state, the dashboard displayed the scores of each team, as well as the teams up next to play. The leaderboards also featured a goal sting video animation, which could be triggered by event facilitators recording goals in the dashboard app.

In the ‘end of the game’ state, the screen would display the final score, the leaderboard tally, and a two-minute countdown to the start of the next game.

The event facilitators would be able to initiate, score, and record final results for each game. Starting a new game in the app would trigger the ‘during game’ state for the leaderboard screens, while ending a game would trigger the ‘end of game’ state. Facilitators were also able to update the leaderboard tally manually, edit the order in which teams would play, and toggle the leaderboard screens to a screensaver video.

Development setup

Our first step was to build a prototype using Socket.io to test the framework of our solution. We worked closely with Nike during this phase to enhance functionality in line with their needs and get the technical solution working to the right specifications.

On the night of the event, the leaderboard and pitch screens were operated through a local web app running on our laptops, which were connected to screens at either end of the venue via HDMI. We mapped out the location of all the screens at the venue and set up a VueJS application using a custom store and sockets, which we used to allocate content to each of the different screens in real time.

We also tested the WiFi connection at the venue in the days leading up to the event, and had a 4G WiFi router on hand as backup as required.

Accounting for flexibility in development

When creating tools and assets for an event, there is only so much that can be planned in advance. Any digital solution needs to be open to schedule changes and flexible enough to cater for hardware or WiFi limitations. This is especially true in the COVID-19 era, where participant details can change at the last minute.

To account for this, we built two versions of the leaderboard: one with inbuilt logic based on the proposed team composition and order, as well as a manual version that allowed teams to be reordered and swapped out easily if one team was unable to make it on the night. This gave the Nike team the flexibility and assurance that any last-minute changes could be easily incorporated into the displays, and the event could still go ahead without a hitch.