Making Every Match a Masterpiece

Challenge

Attend any sporting match—be it a Saturday morning club rugby game, your local derby or an international test—and you’ll notice it immediately: the clash of onecolour against another. These colours don’t just decorate the sidelines or the stands; they turn seats and supporters into a canvas of competing loyalties.

Beyond the hot chips, t-sauced dogs, and plastic cups, the competing colours of the home and away teams define the experience of watching two competing teams go head-to-head. Colour doesn't just fill the stadiums; it ignites passion, fuels rivalries, and creates a sense of belonging amongst those cheering each side on.

As a paint manufacturer long known for its extensive range of colours and expertise, Resene is equally passionate about supporting local sport.As an official partner of New Zealand Football’s National League and the FordFutsal Super League, Resene’s colours are already synonymous with the spirit of the beautiful game across the country.

For some time now, Resene has been vying for possession in the paint category, competing against the aisles of Bunnings and Mitre10 filled with international giants like Dulux and British Paints. These aisles, however, often lack the store expertise to guide customers through the subtleties of choosing the perfect paint for their projects.

In contrast, expertise is what sets Resene apart. No better example is the skilled team of Resene colour consultants who work in Resene Colorshops across NewZealand. These professionals are dedicated to assisting customers seeking inspiration and advice the moment they step into the store.

So with the Woman’s Football World Cup kicking off in stadiums across New Zealand, and its existing ties to the game, Resene saw an opportunity to paint the town with a vibrant spectrum of colours from their range, uniting fans and amplifying the spirit of competition to coincide with one of the biggest sporting events New Zealand will ever see.

Unfortunately, FIFA’s stringent commercial restrictions posed a significant obstacle. The Major Events Management Act (MEMA) established clean zones, clean transport routes, and clean periods around FIFA events to protect official sponsors and prevent ambush marketing. This meant that Resene, despite their active involvement in supporting football, needed a way to avoid any association with the World Cup that could be perceived as infringing on FIFA’s protected commercial interests.

The goal: turn football into Resene Colorshop footfall. All whilst playing on-side.

Strategy & Implementation

In the context of sports, colour transcends mere aesthetics; it embodies allegiance. It forces fans to paint their faces, don their team’s jerseys, and wave their flags with pride. So to genuinely immerse in the energy of such fandom, the media selection needed not only to display their breadth of colours, but to position Resene at the heart of the match day experience—right among the crowds as they made their way to the stadiums, clad in their team’s colours, and lingering in that connection well after the final whistle.

This is where DOOH made the starting lineup. Its ability to infuse the streets with vibrant displays made it the perfect medium to capture the attention of fans during pre-match celebrations and as they approached the venues. Dynamic, digital screens mirrored the colours of the teams they were there to support. Location and time targeting would allow Resene to navigate clean zones and DOOH’s real-time adaptability would allow Resene to automatically update content to reflect the team’s playing and the pulse of the game as it unfolded.

Central to the strategy was Resene’s innovative and aptly named ColourMatch tool, which used advanced colour recognition technology to identify and match colours from any image with Resene’s extensive range of paint shades. By taking an uploaded or selected online image, ReseneColourMatch identifies the predominant colour in the image, and then skilfully identifies its closest match within Resene’s vast spectrum of paint shades.

To execute the DOOH strategy, each competing nation’s home and away kits were fed into the Resene ColourMatch tool, with the representative colours of the team’ jersey for each game matched with the appropriate Resene paint swatch to be displayed. From the ‘Resene Invincible’ of New Zealand, to the ‘ReseneCelebrate’ of Costa Rica.

Implementation

Once shirt colours were determined for each FIFA Woman’s Football World Cup game, a Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) solution, with 28 local games and the win/loss/draw scenarios, was developed. Intertwined was head-to-head, live score, and match result data from the sports app, Tribe, which would trigger the appropriate match content across the DOOH network before, during and after game time. The API feeds would trigger three combinations of colour ratios that would represent both teams and if scores were tied or if one of the teams was in front.

Importantly, the creative execution had to ensure that no reference to the FIFA Woman’s Football World Cup was made. A simple but clever head-to-head colour layout, with the two competing shift colours representing the teams playing on the day, was separated by a paint roller and overlayed with Resene lock up and copy.

Harnessing a DCO solution, and the flexibility and targeting capabilities of programmatic DOOH to abide with FIFA regulation, the Tribe match day and stadium location field in the API was used to build custom triggers to automatically deliver geo-targeted, day-of-week and time-of-day DOOH activity in the cities hosting he day’s World Cup game. Screens that fell into clean zones were removed from targeted during set up.

As the anticipation for kick-off grew in the hours leading up to each match, host cities were subtly awakened to the competing colours of the team ‘match-up’. Using Tribe’s match day data, the teams were displayed across the host city to mark the head-to-head that would shortly be kicking off.

Kick-off then triggered a tactical ‘ColourMatch’ up-weight for the duration of the game. As each game unfolded, the competing teams went head-to-head, not just on the pitch, but also in the colour stakes on screen. The ColourMatch DCO solution system continuously tracked the progression of each match, adjusting the colour territory on each digital billboard for the team in front, and swung as momentum did so on the field.

The moment the final whistle blew and the winning team was declared, the ‘Paint the Town’ phase was triggered. For an hour following the game, cities came alive as the victorious team’s colours were illuminated across LUMO’s digital out-of-home network, in a vibrant, vivid celebration of sport and colour.

Results

Once the stadiums cleared and the Resene ‘Havoc’ of Spain was crowned the Winner, the result was a campaign that captured the essence of the tournament’s excitement, transformed the passion of football into a celebration of colour, and drove significant foot traffic to Resene Colorshops—all without ever crossing thelegal lines set by FIFA.

Across the duration of the tournament, Resene celebrated the colours of competing teams and delivered over 4,000,000 impressions across 43 Digital Billboards in the 5 New Zealand cities where FIFA Women’s World Cup matches were played.

The DCO solution delivered over 300 adaptations in line with real-time match score updates, displaying 16 teams and 32 different colours from the range produced by the Resene ColourMatch tool.

Using Lifesight Footfall analysis, the campaign drove a 65% increase in visitation for those who had seen the DOOH campaign during the tournament vs a controlled group who hadn’t, equating to a modelled 2,419 incremental walk into Resene Colorshops across New Zealand.

A use of DOOH that used colour to turn football, into footfall. And made every match a masterpiece.

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