Tanqueray planned to launch a new gin in Spain for the first time in years, being Spain the most competitive gin market, driven mostly by local premium flavoured gins, and with serious advertising restrictions for alcoholic beverages.

The plan was to introduce an original recipe that Charles Tanqueray created as a tribute to Seville, called Flor de Sevilla. Tanqueray needed a strong response: a powerful launch strategy idea that cut through all the noise and let us reach a wide audience.

For a brand that comes from the UK, we needed to be not just impactful, but also to create a powerful cultural connection to establish Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla as a legitimate tribute that celebrates Seville’s heritage.

We needed to create awareness of the new product, generate word of mouth and earned media coverage that would help the idea conquer Seville first, and then the rest of Spain.

In 1992, for the World Universal Expo of Seville, the famous Spanish singer duo "Los del Rio" (authors of la Macarena) wrote the song "Seville has a special colour". The song soon became an anthem for not just the Expo, but the city, though curiously never revealed what that colour was. Since then, that expression became part of the city's culture, but the question remained unanswered.

Until we decided to find it, and make it part of our product. We created “Searching for the special colour of Seville”. A study based on Data to find out the chromatic identity of the city through the analysis of its streets and the most emblematic corners and monuments.

An idea that would resonate specifically with the people of Seville, but would also grab the interest of the rest of the population, so that they would talk about it.

Once we determined that extracting the city's colour was the right way to find this special colour, the main challenge was to achieve. We shuffled different technical solutions and Google Street View was the most fast and realistic way. At the end, Google Street View is a photo library, so, using their API we would be able to extract all these pictures.

We designed the algorithm that performed 4 main task:

- Navigate across the chosen areas from Google Street View

- Extract pictures through the Google Street View API

- Scan the most represented colour hues

- Remove colour data from the sky and the asphalt, which are elements common to all cities and would end up altering the result

Over a 75% of the extracted colours were in a chromatic range between yellow and red, being orange #FFAB60 the predominant colour

Once we found the special color of the city, we put it in the bottle and we gave it to the city as a tribute. We partnered with the City Council, Los del Río and Pantone and we presented, both the color and the gin, in a reveal event during the "Feria de Abril" (April Fair), the most important and mediatic event in the city. Then the city council recognised it with a plaque and lighted up the most important monuments with that colour and "Los del Río" rewrote the original song, adding the colour to the lyrics 26 years later.

"El color especial de Sevilla" was certified by PANTONE, transforming Seville the first city with its own PANTONE colour. In terms of sales, Tanqueray became the number one-selling gin on Amazon on the first week. Two months after the launch of the product, it was out of stock in some parts of Spain.

The city council recognized it with a plaque and lighted up the most important monuments with that colour.

In terms of PR we got more than 120.000.000 impressions, that meant more than 2.000.000€ of earned media value. Regarding social media, the reach was over 25 millions and there were an astonishing engagement of 300.000 interactions.

The special colour became a trend. Fashion magazines started talking about it as the season colour. Important publications related to tourism, like Lonely Planet, invited people to discover it. The project was one recognized as one of the most outstanding creative projects of 2018 by the prestigious magazine Contagious.