Doing the Big D

As host city to Super Bowl XLV this past February, Dallas encouraged local businesses – including communications giant AT&T, whose corporate headquarters are in Dallas – to show their support of the epic sporting event through signage and outdoor advertising displays.

Via its advertising agency, BBDO Atlanta (www.bbdoatl.com), AT&T contracted with Metro Media Technologies  to create five larger-than-life building wraps welcoming football fans to their hometown. The graphics, which ran the gamut size-wise, and were displayed on various buildings around the city and near Cowboy Stadium.

BBDO provided MMT with print-ready, InDesign art files, which were output via Caldera RIP software to the company’s proprietary, drum-technology printer.

“We have paint-to-paint drums in our plant in Ohio, the largest being 63 feet in circumference x 32 feet in width,” explains MMT senior VP Bill Ishida. “We use a proprietary paint along with our own paint jets to produce the work. There is no drying time and it’s cured as it’s printed, so any sort of finishing process can take place immediately post-print.”

Because each of the five buildings being wrapped was architecturally distinct and their surfaces made of different materials, the company opted for two different types of media, using, in total, some 28,285 square feet.

“Two of the buildings were textured brick, one was a type of stone called travertine, another was a combination of both glass and cast concrete, and there was another building that was just a glass structure, so we used two different materials,” says account director Bobby Thompson, who oversaw the project. “For four of the buildings, we used a 3M 3662-10 self-adhesive vinyl, and the material we used on the glass building was ClearFocus ImageVue, a perforated self-adhesive PVC.”

Print time for the largest of the buildings, which measured 15,000 square feet, was three days. The remaining four wraps were printed simultaneously, and took three days in total.

“Once the printing was completed, we used one overlaminate for both materials – 3M 8509,” Thompson says. “We utilized heat sealers during the lamination process, and everything was hand-trimmed.”

MMT sent five crews to Dallas for the installation – one team per building – each battling unseasonably cold weather, snow, and freezing rain, in the days leading up to the big game. Four of the installs occurred simultaneously over the course of about three days and the fifth and largest – the 15,000 square-foot glass building – was also the most complex, and took about five days to set up.

“It was not rigged for a swing stage, which we use for installation,” Thompson explains. “This building had a 12-foot parapet wall, so we had to build an artificial platform to extend davit arms over the wall to attach to the suspended swing stage. With the size of the width of that building being 190 feet, we ended up doing five stage moves to complete the install.”
 

MMT
www.mmt.com