Palais of Speed

A thinner than thin sole. A shoe that fits like a glove, yet it’s more like a sock: Snug, yet indestructible. In the realm of progress, a teensy-weensy precision laser is the tool that separates the whizzes from the tools. Obsession, sweating the small stuff, these are the neon cogs and wires pumping the racing, beating hearts of us designers and makers. Forever tripping out over the tiniest of incremental improvements and features.

But outside the universe of the designer, product-benefit led marketing – particularly when it’s focused on an incremental innovation within an existing product – is a complex beast. There are some companies that have a consistently good track record – Apple is the obvious traditional example with their history of tapping into a seemingly bottomless well of fan enthusiasm for an improved camera lens or a whizzier interface. But many brands fall a little flat in being able to carry the spirit of the energy seen in the boardrooms and product studios that the innovations are cooked up in, out to the wider world, running the risk of getting that deadening audience’s response that nobody wants to hear: ‘so what?’

To us, Nike is the indisputable goddess of benefit-led marketing. And the reason they are so on-point time and time again is that the showing and the telling is always done through the lens of creativity. If you view creativity as the art of challenge, of generating something new, of giving life to fresh ideas and perspectives… then, by its very definition, you’re never going to bore people with tired clichés and will always be able to offer a stimulating conversation starter (whether verbal or visual) to audiences. 

The Nike Mercurial was a product that was all about speed. It was this benefit that formed the focal point for the creative brief for kicking off 2016’s summer of international football in Paris. Working closely with the football brand team, we conjured up an experience designed to get the kids fully immersed in the Nike universe and bring the concept of speed to life as a visceral and cultural experience in ‘The Palais of Speed’ in the uber-contemporary art space Palais de Tokyo.

The ‘Faster Than’ challenge, designed as an adrenalised immersive experience gave everyone a chance to lace their feet into a pair of the newly-launched Mercurial Superfly V boots and run a virtual race against a character of their choice, including the likes of football's fastest players Cristiano Ronaldo, Anthony Martial, Eden Hazard and a Formula 1 car. And a cockerel. (The cockerel turned out to be the most popular character to compete against – sorry Christiano).

The kids walked off (or, rather, sprinted) with a digital recording of their speed and images captured in the photobooth that they could then share on the socials. If they’d done well in showing off fan-level knowledge of football on the brain-twisting Mind Games they could also share that out too. “Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang turned up and wanted to test his speed against the F1 car”.

Visual System and Le Tone geeked out with us and created a speed-themed giant immersive soundscape sculpture with synchronised pulsating lights and effects to take you out on a wild flight of imagination, drawing inspiration from the adrenalised experience of a Formula 1 sprint.

We set up installations including a ‘pitch to pavement’ wall that brought to life the 20-year-long genealogy of the Mercurial in all its glory, from its original kangaroo leather construction through a succession of tech-wizardry that each gave those incremental gains in performance.

And we gave every consumer the chance to actually become the designers themselves, through a jersey customisation station that allowed them to select from a vast array of artists-designed details, including over 100 artist-designed woven patches.

The heart-thumping beauty of this project (where a sports experience overlapped with art, entertainment, culture and product fan-dom) was that it was all conceived with genuine love for details and design. A reverence and appreciation of genuine creativity. Because, after all, it takes one beating heart to get another going. Obsession shows, and it makes all the design difference.