Balls to brands
Kick off with a classic
It’s World Cup time, of course. For us here, it’s a time of intense armchair TV scheduling, a semi-work related study of world brands both on the pitch perimeter – and on the pitch itself. And a chance to indulge in childhood fantasies, like going into the newsagent and asking for the ENTIRE box of FIFA World Cup stickers, as a way of fast tracking our sticker book completion [hey – we’re doing it for the kids… honestly].
One major brand icon classic that, like an Obi Wan Kenobi ever-present phantom force, we’ll be seeing a lot of everywhere yet nowhere at the same time, is the Telstar.
‘Telstar?’, you say. ‘The groundbreaking communications satellite?’. No. ‘Oh, the groundbreaking slice of pop that you always imagined would be Stingray’s Troy Tempest’s number one desert island disc?’. Wrong again.
We’re talking about the groundbreaking Adidas Telstar. Still non the wiser? OK – here’s a bit of fun you can have in the pub at half time. And sure fire proof we’re talking about a design classic. Get your mates around the table to draw ‘a football’ on their nearest beermat without showing each other what they’ve done. Then get them all to simultaneously show everyone what they’ve drawn.
‘Wow! Amazing! Psychic power! Look we’ve all drawn a circle with largish dots, a bit like a pepperoni pizza!’. They’ve all drawn an Adidas Telstar. Given time, some of the more artistic/less drunk people will have attempted black pentagons. Given more time, the very talented will have connected the pentagons with hexagon-forming lines.
Yes – the Adidas Telstar is one of the most iconic pieces of design in the world. First introduced during the Mexico 1970 tournament, the Telstar was high contrast black and white partly, charmingly, because it would show up better on black & white TVs. The twelve black pentagons and twenty hexagon pieces that make up the sphere were also rumoured to be better at letting linesmen know if the ball had crossed the line if interfered with by a white post; a legacy of the previous tournament’s goal non-goal in 1966. Intriguingly, it’s said the amazingly neat tessellation that did indeed resemble the multi-mirrored Telstar satellite, was arrived at by that old design chestnut of a ‘reappropriated idea’. We think thousands of young Stephen Hawkins chose to go into a career in mathematics off the back of this football design, or to give it its mathematical definition a ‘spherical polyhedron analog to the truncated icosahedron’. It is said that the design was ‘inspired’ from reinterpreting NASA’s weather balloons and Apollo mission sea landing inflatable buoys.
It went on to appear in the next World Cup in 1974 and then had the rebrand treatment to become the Adidas Tango for Argentina in 1978. Although this too became a icon in its own right [yes – it’s got a Facebook page], it says a lot that the official logo for the Argentinian tournament had a Telstar at its heart. The king is dead, long live the king.
And, so, here we find ourselves, 36 years and nine World Cups since – and we’re still in love with the Telstar. It’s everywhere in corporate endorsement marketing; logos, illustrations, icons. And a version of it is even contained within the official 2010 logo. Even though the 2010 ball looks nothing like Telstar!
For 2010, the sinister sounding Adidas Jabulani official ball for all the games has a more organic, non-linear swooshy go-faster triangular look about it. It looks like the boffins that have designed this ball’s tessellation have been playing in Adobe Illustrator too. ‘Jabulani’ apparently means ‘rejoice’ in Zulu, but frankly we can’t muster much enthusiasm for this. It’s quite… flat.
We’d love it if they brought back the Telstar. Love it. Someone at FIFA needs to realize that certain designs were never bettered. More than that, affection and an unforeseen elevation of this design becoming the generic in its category has occurred. It’s come to symbolize the world’s most popular sport. It’s done to football what Dyson did to vacuums. OK, so we don’t have black & white TVs any more. Is that reason enough to change everything? We don’t need watches with hands either; but the coolness, cache and irony of digital watches only stretches so far, making us return to more charming solutions.
We’ll cite the Telstar in meetings where clients say they need a rebrand. It’s a useful anecdote to get people beyond thinking fundamental change is inevitable and to reconsider the heritage, even love, of what they already have or had. Often, a client’s brand success is just too close to them for them to appreciate and they leave the good stuff behind. Are you reading this Eddie Stobart? Pepsi? BBC weather symbol designers? NASA [though they did humbly bring the old one back]? And many, many more organizations that have, or want, to anxiously swap shirts in these new austere times.
We wish all the participating nations well.
300million © 2010
