This concept was created for an assignment in which the premise was a company of our choosing that has a pre-existing presence in sports marketing is re-evaluating their current presence and it’s effectiveness, and we, as the agency are meant to evaluate their current plan and advise them on whether to continue forward, change their strategy, or pull out of sports marketing entirely.
In selecting a brand I decided to browse what brands were sponsors of underperforming Formula 1 teams (namely Haas, Williams, and Alpine), and discovered Boeing was an official partner of Alpine BWT Formula 1, but their logo is either completely absent from the car, or so small that I was genuinely unable to find it. For that reason, despite F1 being the largest motorsport in the world, this felt like a poor usage of ad dollars, and as such I proposed reinvesting those dollars from being the minor sponsor of an underperforming F1 team to being a title sponsor of a WEC endurance racing team. The idea was that instead of using the modern approach to livery design that relies on many small sponsors, we would use the car as one large canvas much like they did in the 80s and 90s, dedicated to Boeing.
These old liveries have a tendency to far outlive the ad dollars spent on them, a prime example being the Renown 787b, being one of racings most iconic liveries despite the fact that the company has a small precense outside Japan.
With that in mind the design for the Boeing livery was loosly inspired by the BASF livery for the BMW M1 Procar (seen in the top right of the image above), as seeing it sparked the idea of using topographical line maps as the basis for the car’s imagery. A simplified depiction of an elevation map was used to keep the design relatively clean, and a gradient fade was used to break up the design and add additional variation. Blue was chosen as it is the brand colour of boeing, but a lighter shade was chosen to make the car more eyecatching and memorable.
To mock up the livery a 3d model made for the game Assetto Corsa was used, and the preview function in it’s content manager was used to view progress/changes to the livery in real time as soon as they were saved. The Cadillac V-Series.R was chosen as our car of choice because unlike many other WEC teams, Cadillac in recent years has not only allowed another brand to be the leading sponsor of their car (with their collaborating with Hertz on this very car), but also are one of few teams that allowed a full livery that diverted from their brands first party guidelines. A handful of small secondary sponsor logos were placed on the car (as placeholders for potential sponsors, though michelin and Rolex do both have a current presence sponsoring WEC), and there is space for additional secondary sponsors, but overall the idea was to keep the car mostly dedicated to the livery itself, with the Boeing logo on the stabalizer being the main focalpoint.
