Experiential Design
The Lagos Yacht Club's annual boat racing championship has been sponsored by Nigerian Bottling Company, the Coca-Cola bottler in Nigeria, for over a decade and is one of the fixtures of the Lagos sporting calendar. GenMedia 360 delivered the brand environment across the club's waterfront.
An open waterfront is the hardest place to put printed branding. Wind loads on every vertical surface, sun and salt on every printed one, and a site with almost no walls to build against. Everything has to be freestanding and weighted. On top of that, the audience is outdoors from the first race to the prize-giving, which means the branding is under direct scrutiny in full daylight for eight hours, with no lighting rig to flatter it.
Structures were specified for the conditions rather than for the mockup. Freestanding weighted units and wind-tolerant sail formats were used throughout, chosen because they move with the wind rather than fight it, which is also how they read correctly against water and rigging instead of looking imported from an indoor event. Substrates and inks were selected to hold red through a full day of direct sun, the one color on this job that cannot be allowed to drift. Brand presence was concentrated at the two points every camera is aimed at, the waterline where the boats come in and the prize-giving, rather than distributed evenly around a site where most of the sightline is open water. Deck and bar areas were dressed as places to sit rather than surfaces to brand, so the sponsor read as host of the day instead of advertiser at it.
A decade of NBC putting Coca-Cola behind this championship was given a physical form built for the setting, in an environment that held its finish from the first race to the last trophy.
