Ithra is Saudi Arabia’s leading cultural and creative destination. The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 presented an opportunity for all Arab nations to build deeper connections with the world. We saw this as an opportunity to further expand our brand awareness while creating value towards our audience through creativity and cross-cultural engagement.

The objective was to bring the world of art and football together in a visionary manner that would strengthen Ithra's position as an institution that is at the forefront of technology. With all eyes on the region, this was also a unique moment in history to cement Ithra’s place as a leading cultural and creative destination on centre stage.

‘For the Art of the Beautiful Game’ is a creative proposition which focuses on capturing the highlights witnessed in every match.

- We packaged the tournament narrative as an exclusive art collection.

- FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 hosted 32 nations competing in a total of 64 matches.

- We selected 1 artist from each of the 32 countries that were participating in the World Cup and asked them to contribute art that would represent their country in our Collection

- Our AI-powered software would combine human and digital art using unique design parameters driven by the match statistics.

- The design was dictated by these statistics.

- A singular piece of artwork representing each of the 64 matches would be created.

- Each artwork would serve as a visual narrative of the match that took place between the 2 nations.

To capture the important moments from each and every match and immortalize them in actual art form; creating something the world had never seen before that would combine machine and human creativity with live match statistics such as goals scored, corners, penalties and attempts on goal.

The heart of the idea was capturing the story of the FIFA World Cup 2022. The story is made up of 64 chapters, each chapter was linked to one of the 64 World Cup matches that were disputed.

We developed AI software to merge the statistics with the human and digital art of each competing country; ensuring the collection had visual cohesion while also capturing the uniqueness of all 64 matches.

Leveraging the post-match excitement created a sense of urgency that could be used to drive anticipation; over the course of the 20 minutes after each match – the unique match NFT would be developed by our AI software to slowly reveal the final NFT available for the world to see via Opensea.io, digitally displayed on-ground in Qatar at an exhibition and on a dedicated website.

Metrics speak for themselves, the campaign was a success. In addition, the tech was flawless and the launch event was well attended by the right mix of officials, media, and C-level industry folk.

A Press Release was published in 32 languages. As a result of our awareness campaign, we got astronomical views on our promo video. Our other KPI was linked to the number of curious minds that visited the team, eager to learn more about the initiative by asking questions and wanting to learn more.

As artists collaborate with AI generation technology to create unique NFTs that combine art, soccer, and technology, we bridged the gap between Web2 and Web3, as well as between humans and machines.

872 Media Pick-Ups.

Distributed in 32 languages.

200K+ website visits.

11.8 M reach

Millions of delighted fans.