WHAT

We created a campaign that needed to have a meaningful cultural impact in a really disruptive way, so taking the cue from a national insight, we used creative data to fill in a blank: in Spain everyone associates Seville with its special colour but no one knows what that colour is. The innovative use of data was based on an algorithm that we developed to find out something that had never been done before: the colour of a city. That’s how we linked the product and generated an emotional connection through data to win the hearts of Spaniards.

BACKGROUND

Tanqueray planned to launch a new gin in Spain, the most competitive gin market, driven by local premium flavoured gins, and with serious advertising restrictions for alcoholic beverages. The plan was to introduce an original recipe that Charles Tanqueray created as a tribute to Seville, called Flor de Sevilla. Tanqueray needed a strong response: a powerful launch strategy idea that cut through all the noise and let us reach a wide audience. For a brand that comes from the UK, we needed to be not just impactful, but also to create a powerful cultural connection to establish Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla as a legitimate tribute that celebrates Seville’s heritage. We needed to create awareness of the new product, generate the word of mouth and earned media coverage that helped the idea travel well beyond Seville

INSIGHT

In 1992, for the World Universal Expo of Seville, the famous Spanish singer duo "Los del Rio" (authors of la Macarena) wrote the song "Seville has a special colour". The song soon became an anthem of not just the Expo, but the city, though curiously never revealed what that colour was. Since then, that expression became part of the city's culture, but the question remained unanswered. Until we decided to find it, and make it part of our product.

IDEA

“Searching for the special colour of Seville”. A study based on Data to find out the chromatic identity of the city through the analysis of its streets and the most emblematic corners and monuments.

EXECUTION

Once we determined that extracting the city's colour was the right way to find this special colour, the main challenge was to achieve. We shuffled different technical solutions and Google Street View was the most fast and realistic way. At the end, Google Street View is a photo library, so, using their API we would be able to extract all these pictures. 

Using a heat map, we determined the busiest areas and developed an algorithm that, taking Google Street View as a source, was able to go through the streets analyzing and extracting the predominant chromatic information from each image, comparing thousands of tones with each other. After analyzing over 10,000 images, over 30 monuments, over 1,000 streets and over 600,000 colour hues thoroughly compared, the algorithm extracted the following mathematical result: the average hexadecimal colour of the city. Once we had the Special Colour of Seville, we used it to create Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla, the first gin made with the colour of a city. Pantone certified it as “The Special Colour of Seville”, making Sevilla the first city in the world with its own Pantone. But the Special colour of Seville went further: The city council recognized it with a plaque and lighted up the most important monuments with that colour. Los del Río rewrote the original song, adding the colour 26 years later.

PANTONE CERTIFIED THE COLOUR

"El color especial de Sevilla" was certified by PANTONE, transforming Seville the first city with its own PANTONE colour. In terms of sales, Tanqueray became the number oneselling gin on Amazon on the first week. Two months after the launch of the product, it was out of stock in some parts of Spain. The city council recognized it with a plaque and lighted up the most important monuments with that colour. In terms of PR we got more than 120.000.000 impressions, that meant more than 2.000.000€ of earned media value. Regarding social media, the reach was over 25 millions and there were an astonishing engagement of 300.000 interactions. The special colour became a trend. Fashion magazines started talking about it as the season colour. Important publications related to tourism, like Lonely Planet, invited people to discover it. The project was one recognized as one of the most outstanding creative projects of 2018 by the prestigious magazine Contagious.