One great way to promote your brand to a wide audience is to choose an event that’s sure to draw heaps of attention, and create a branded point of interest. However, you can leverage the method if you’re already an international brand too. The marketers on behalf of beverage company Milo Australia planned to employ this engaging technique, and requested custom inflatable footballs for an upcoming AFL game in Melbourne.
Our mission as a business is to offer exceptional customer service in the pursuit of helping other companies, big or small, reach their target audiences in fun and creative ways, and this project really embodied that endeavour. We were overjoyed at the prospect of collaborating with the client on this project!
Mapping Out the Play
We’ve all experienced it. Sometimes kids, even when excited about something, get so distracted that they would gladly wander off and do something else. The event organisers had this knowledge in mind when they decided to host fun activities away from the main action. Who better to join in on the fun than a beverage brand best-known for producing chocolate drinks to give kids the “nourishing energy they need to get the best out of their day?”
The marketer commissioned 9 footballs in total, each measuring 1.5 metres long with width to scale. They were to be set up around an area where free activities would take place, like games, give-aways, and meet-and-greets with AFL players. The custom inflatable footballs were to be matched to the brand’s colour and branded with their logo as well, so there would be no doubt about exactly who was sponsoring these particular festivities.
The only challenge we could potentially foresee was getting them to be footballs, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle. Inflatables tend to want to be a more rigid structure, such as arches preferring to have straight legs and a straight top bar. For inflatable balls, they would rather be perfectly round than have shape to them. We sat down and quickly worked out a solution that worked beautifully!
Adorning the Court
These custom inflatable footballs called for an uncomplicated, humble design, with only two aspects to transfer onto the units. We have enough experience blowing up smaller products that the process of scaling them to size took barely any effort, including sizing the simple beverage logo on the side panels.
The other quality we had to reflect onto the custom inflatable footballs was the colour. After being in business for so long, there isn’t much we aren’t familiar with, but getting these units just right required a method we don’t get to use all that often, so it was a bit exciting. In printing the materials we use for our inflatables, we frequently use full colour, because it can easily achieve a nice, vibrant look. However, this time the colour was so specific that we had to use the pantone matching system to find the right green.
After aligning the design with the facets of the client’s branding, it came time to decide which material would serve our purposes best, which was pretty much already decided by the shape these custom inflatable footballs had to take on.
Coming Together as a Team
To achieve an oval-like shape just to begin constructing Milo's custom inflatable footballs, we had to get a little creative. Instead of just slapping panels together and calling it good, the inherent round-ness had to be manipulated in a way that would give these balls a deliberate shape. What we had to do was purposely cut each panel so they could attach to each other but still maintain their slightly cylindrical quality, then fuse a piece on the end to act as a point.
The plasticised polymer we used for this project is our most durable option overall. It also beats the competition in terms of basic hardness, which helped us quite a bit in achieving the unique shape: polyvinyl chloride. The reason these 9 custom inflatable footballs’ purpose made choosing the material a no-brainer was that they are just meant to be smallish inflatable balls to entertain kids, not towering over the spectators or in the background on stage at a music festival.
Only PVC has the durability to withstand being welded without having to solidify before moving on to the next seam. By using this method, we can completely forego constructing the unit with a constant blower to keep it inflated. It can just be filled up, sealed off, and touched up if it happens to deflate a bit.
Another Field Goal!
From ensuring the custom inflatable footballs exceeded all the client’s expectations to running through our extensive protocols, to shipping the units out must have taken longer than we thought it would, because by the time they arrived, the game was already looming. Luckily the solutions we came up with made setup a breeze, and the only thing left to do was wait. The event within an event must have been a great success of a branding effort, because since then, Inflatable Anything has had the pleasure to collaborate with the beverage company on several occasions.
It gives us great pleasure to know that something we created can really make living, breathing human beings feel closer to or identify with a brand. Contact our team today to discuss how we can bridge the gap between you and your potential customers!
