An easy way to get your name out there and build a positive reputation is through brand activation events that serve your community in a meaningful way. One of Australia’s top free to air stations, Channel Nine, came to Inflatable Anything for an interactive inflatable ball game based on their logo to use at local events and activations on an ongoing basis.
Engaging the community with a brand activation, especially when it is tailored to occupy its kids, is a great business call. Not only does the interactive nature of it leave a much more long-lasting impression, nor is it an inherently share-worthy occurrence, but in this case it also instills a certain kind of trust, which is exactly what a news station wants to have with the people they’re tasked with informing.
We could not wait to get to work on this unique interactive inflatable ball game!
Planning Out Segments
While not too elaborate overall, the interactive game had heaps of different parts we weren’t fully accustomed to packaging into 1 inflatable. The front-facing, visible structure was to be a 2.5 metres high by 3.5 metres wide recreation of the Channel Nine logo, with the gridded circles as holes to throw balls through. However, even this simple design needed some creative solutions to make it work.
The client wanted the logo to be as close to their branding as possible, so it needed to stand upright without too much visible support. The solution our team came up with was constructing the interactive inflatable ball game itself with a wedge protruding out of the backside that, once fully inflated, would help hold it steady. When it came to the community actually playing this game, two obstacles that cropped up were making sure the balls would actually fit through the holes-fair is fair- and that they wouldn’t go flying out the back of the unit.
In the Dressing Room
Since the area around the holes of the interactive inflatable ball game would blow up considerably, the 40 centimetres in diameter space for the balls to pass through would decrease. So we advised the client to insert a more solid piece of matching PVC lining each hole prior to inflation to hold the shape more or less in that size. To catch the balls that make it through, we attached a net behind the 9 gridded holes. The inflatable itself was to match the station’s colours, white and blue.
Once the design was tweaked a bit to accommodate obstacles and finally approved to print our chosen fabric for this interactive inflatable ball game, we used a full surface print on our in-house inkjet printer. In this printing method, the ink is directly applied to the fabric after it has been bonded together. The biggest advantage of it is that there won’t be weird areas where the image on two sides of a seam won’t line up. Though this particular scenario is hardly even a consideration for this interactive inflatable ball game, that is the kind of quality we like to extend to our clients, especially when recreating a logo.
Now Over to Production
Inflatable Anything offers 2 options in material that are largely considered the best-quality: polyvinyl chloride and polyester. Both offer many great advantages, but for this interactive inflatable ball game, the qualities that won out were PVC’s mechanical strength, weather resistance, fire retardancy (especially important around members of the public), and the ability to be easily transferred.
Although a welded polyvinyl chloride seam can hold an inflatable in perfect shape, it’s not as tough as PVC. So, what to do when we favour the material but not the construction method? In the case of PVC, there is luckily another way to bond the panels together securely while also allowing the compressed air to freely flow through the inflatable: sewing! It’s a bit of a delicate process, but we have the best equipment and we know exactly what we’re doing after so many years of experience.
Going Live in 3, 2...
Though finalising the design of this interactive inflatable ball game took some time, we weren’t about to rush the process and risk sending out a subpar product. We still took our time to make sure the unit passed our quality control protocols, with enough time to fit its shipping needs to Adelaide. Making sure the unit met all of Channel Nine's requirements is extremely important to us, of course, but all that effort means nothing if we also can’t get the product to them in time to ensure a successful event.
Here at Inflatable Anything, we love spreading brand awareness to communities, especially when, in doing so, we also bring these communities themselves closer together. Contact our team today to find out how we can help you connect with your audience!
