Wimbledon in Style for Marketers, Bringing a Reverent Hush to Their Ads
“So there is that pressure, that natural tension in the technology department, who knows
that if you want all this technology to be enabled, it’s got to be above ground, it’s got to be visible, but no one can see it and it’s got to be green.”
Wimbledon, which stops play when darkness falls, does not have the light posts
that many other tournaments use for mounting and concealing various technologies.
That includes not just the meticulous cultivation of the purple and white flowers
that line the lanes of the grounds of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, but also how the tournament is wired for the wider world and how its commercial partners advertise themselves.
“That is a sort of an ongoing challenge with many, many things: How do you have
tennis in an English garden when you need all this technology around it?
How do you go about hiding it all?”
Alexandra Willis, the head of communications, content and digital for the All England Lawn Tennis Club, said even some decisions
that affect the competition have been made with aesthetic considerations in mind.
“How can you put it in but have it not overwhelm the experience of actually coming to Wimbledon for tennis in an English garden?”
Advertising by Wimbledon’s various commercial partners must be similarly unobtrusive.
