This ace ABN AMRO campaign turned 50,000 tennis balls destined for landfill into a playground

For over 46 years ABN AMRO has been the proud sponsor of The ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament. At the tournament’s core is the limitless passion of all those involved: the international talent, the ball boys and girls, and the organization that makes this tournament a success every year.

We discovered that 300 million tennis balls are produced every year, almost nothing of which is recycled. Not very sustainable. We also found out that it is nearly impossible to recycle tennis balls. So hard, in fact, that it hadn’t really been done very successfully before. So, it was time to ‘Change the Game’. Make the impossible possible.

The strategy

As a bank that firmly believes in the circular economy, ABN AMRO is constantly trying to accelerate the sustainability shift. We created a concept that highlights the following three pillars during the tournament: Tennis, Limitless Passion and Sustainability & Circularity.

The campaign

We used a top-secret recycling process that allowed us to re-purpose old tennis balls and transform them into brand new products. A tennis vibration dampener, a sustainable roof tile and ‘The Circular!’: a sneaker worn by the ball boys and girls at the tournament. But we didn’t stop there. We asked visitors to bring their old tennis balls to the tournament so that we could re-purpose them to create a brand-new Krajicek Playground for which we needed 50,000 used tennis balls.

The results

We created the products, a campaign film, behind-the-scenes videos of each product, and an exhibition at the tournament to tell the story.

• More than 5 million online video impressions.
• More than 2 million Snapchat impressions.
• 1.98 million Twitter impressions.
• 123k visitors at the WTT.
• 18 articles and 1 TV spot.
• 2 radio shows.

This project was a winner at The Drum Experience Awards 2019.