Situation
Manchester City’s Etihad Campus is amongst the world’s leading elite sports facilities. It comprises the Etihad Stadium, the Academy Stadium, City Football Academy (CFA) training facility and the Club's headquarters. So when Manchester City approached Bert to design interactive experiences for its Campus Tour we jumped at the chance. The club was looking to enhance two specific areas of the tour; deeper engagement with fans and the football group’s global community projects; and an experience providing a chance for fans to create their dream playing squad from City’s stars across all eras.
We created two interactive experiences for the Eithad Campus Tour; ‘Dream Teams’ and ‘Cityzens Community’.
Both interactive solutions had to reflect Manchester City’s brand and communicate its values through both design and experience; fans first; a passion for football; community; originality; and future. The designs had to frame content from across the globe; and from different eras, creating significant challenges in ensuring a consistency in quality of experience. The result puts fans firmly in control, through simple, intuitive on-brand experiences.
Reaction from the City team and, most importantly, fans was fantastic from launch. In addition both experiences were shortlisted for British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) awards.
We created two interactive experiences, ‘Dream Teams’ and ‘Cityzens Community’ accessed by fans via giant touchscreens.
Dream Teams allows fans to choose their all-time favourite City players & combine them into a single starting XI. The experience provides access to the information of hundreds of City legends, who can be dropped onto an interactive pitch, swapped and played in different positions. Multiple users can create Dream Teams, and can then share and compete their dream line-ups. The dream teams can can be shared via social to encourage debate and encourage more fans to take part.
Cityzens Community displays an interactive global map, allowing fans to discover some of the great current and future projects that are making a difference the world over.
Growth
Working with Manchester City’s selected digital partner D2, and through Campus visits, research into player archives and digital exploration, we created outline concepts ready for digital CoCreation sessions with fans and project partners. These fan insights allowed us to iterate rapidly, creating prototypes which were subject to further exploration. CoCreation continued to shape the product until the final experiences were realised.
We identified that the solutions should be simple, collaborative and open, in-line with the Club’s ‘community’ ethos. We set out to create experiences capable of engaging multiple fans concurrently. Our solution for both experiences was to create multi-touch, giant touchscreens - each capable of being played by individuals or ‘teams’.
