Nissan Art Installation Idents Capture Emotional History Of UEFA Champions League

Nissan, the Japanese car manufacturer, activated its partnership with the UEFA Champions League for the 2020/21 football season through a set of sponsorship bumpers that will run globally over the course of the season.

By leveraging its rights around the world’s leading football club competition, the Nissan United Sport (NUS) team, which is comprised of London based sports marketing agencies Dark Horses and Fuse, teamed up with production company Friends Electric to direct the bumpers through Berlin-based collective Polynoid.

The aim was to drive awareness around Nissan’s global product positioning of Electrification, so the idea was to draw attention to the parallels of the feeling a fan gets from watching the most electrifying moments in UEFA Champions League history to the similar exhilarating feeling you get from driving an electric vehicle.

Creatively, NUS also wanted to ‘create the kind of idents that other idents have posters of hanging on their bedroom wall’, so they worked closely with Polynoid to

identify the conceptual and visual potential and began the process from scratch, building everything entirely from CGI.

Visually, the aim was also to create an architectural space that would influence/rival the flowing elegance of Zaha Hadid’s architectural output to provide real standout.

The resulting content was a series of six idents, running in a variety of version around the world.

Click to view creative

The multi-organisation team was led by agency Dark Horses where the team included ECD Steve Howell, Copy Writer Josh Pearce, Art Director Sean Johnson, Agency Producer Andy Walsh, Senior Account Director Max Arkell, Account Manager Tia Sackett, Strategists Matt Readman and Mark Lloyd.

The partnerships arrangement was handled by Fuse, while the production company was Friends Electric with Directors Polynoid, Executive Producer Fe and animation by Polynoid and a team at Woodblock which included Jan Bitzer, Tim Jockl, Paul Schicketanz, Lars Wagner, Conrad Ostwald, Moritz Glaesle, Thorsten Loeffler, Csaba Letay, Markus Eschrich, Michael Heberlein, Felix Barthel, Ivan Vasilijevic, Ian Hutchinson, Marco Kowalik, Benjiamin Sugar, Helen Choi, Corentin Ligot and Falko Paeper.

Comment:

It was back in September 2017 that it was announced that Nissan had extended its official partnership of UEFA’s Champions League for a further three years running up to the end of the 2020-21 tournament.

The new work follows on from Nissan’s 2019/20 Champions League activation strands which included the (Covid curtailed) late 2019/early 2020 Trophy Tour