Nike Chalkbot (Most Contagious)

17 Dec 2009

This video features in Most Contagious 2009, Contagious Magazine's round-up of the most innovative campaigns and trends of the past year. Download the PDF here.

From Wieden + Kennedy, Portland for LIVESTRONG, Lance Armstrong’s cancer charity. At the Tour de France each year, cycling enthusiasts chalk messages of support on the side of the course to encourage and communicate with the competitors. Armed with this insight, Nike set about acting as a conduit to a broader audience. Developed in conjunction with software and design studio DeepLocal, Pittsburgh and robotics developer Standard Robot, the Chalkbot is a robotic chalking mechanism that receives, processes, prints, captures and delivers data (text, GPS coordinates and photographs). It received messages from anywhere in the world via Twitter to @Chalkbot, via an SMS shortcode, or from an entry form on wearyellow.com and printed them along the roads of the Tour de France in bright, LIVESTRONG yellow using 48 nozzles and vats of emulsified chalk.

All messages were also photographed by the Chalkbot, and the GPS coordinates captured. This information was then returned to the message sender via email. During the course of the Tour, the Chalkbot sprayed over 100,000 messages of hope in vibrant LIVESTRONG yellow, and one gigantic Contagious logo.