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How Tanqueray Found the Official Color of Seville
Tanqueray's 'Searching for the Special Color of Seville' is an integrated campaign published in Spain in April 2018, created by Madrid agency PS21, in which a bespoke algorithm analyzed more than 10,000 images across Seville to derive a single representative hue — hexadecimal #FFAB60 — which was subsequently certified by Pantone as the city's official color, anchoring the launch of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla.
The campaign takes its conceptual foundation from an unanswered cultural question. Los del Río's beloved Sevillian anthem 'Sevilla Tiene Un Color Especial' declares that the city possesses a special color but never names it. PS21 built the entire strategic and creative premise around resolving that question on behalf of Tanqueray, a gin brand whose new expression, Flor de Sevilla, draws its identity directly from the Andalusian capital's bitter-orange character. The campaign was produced in partnership with Gear Seven and submitted to the advertising industry approximately six years ago, making it one of the more durable creative data cases to emerge from Spain in the 2018 cycle.
In Spain, where gin culture had established deep commercial roots by 2018, the launch of a Seville-inspired variant demanded more than conventional lifestyle advertising. Tanqueray and PS21 chose instead to make the city itself the proof point — conducting what amounted to a civic chromatic survey, analyzing 30 monuments, approximately 1,000 streets, and roughly 600,000 distinct hues before arriving at #FFAB60, according to reporting by LBBOnline. The resulting color was not merely a brand asset; Pantone's certification gave it institutional legitimacy, transforming a product launch into a cultural artifact. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 79 out of 100, reflecting strong creative data craft and award performance against a single integrated media asset.
PS21 identified a gap between cultural emotion and factual knowledge at the heart of Seville's identity. The agency's insight was precise: a song performed for decades by Los del Río had embedded the idea of a 'special color' into collective Sevillian consciousness without ever resolving what that color actually was, according to PS21's own published case materials on Ps21 Works. That unresolved tension gave Tanqueray a culturally legitimate reason to intervene with data rather than sentiment.
The strategic architecture placed creative technology at the center of the campaign rather than in a supporting role. Creative technology director Jacobo Pérez led the algorithmic development, which processed more than 10,000 images drawn from Seville's urban and architectural environment, as documented by LBBOnline. The scope of the analysis — 30 monuments, approximately 1,000 streets, and around 600,000 hues — gave the methodology scientific credibility that a human art direction decision could not have achieved. Pantone's subsequent certification of #FFAB60 as Seville's official color converted a brand exercise into a verifiable civic fact.
In Spain, the gin category was accelerating sharply in 2018. Tanqueray sold approximately 3.5 million nine-liter cases globally in 2017, a rise of 16.7% that made it the fastest-growing major gin brand in that ranking, according to The Spirits Business. Competitor Gordon's sold 5.1 million cases in the same year, up 10.9% per The Spirits Business, while Bombay Sapphire moved 4.0 million cases, up 5.9% per The Spirits Business. Within Spain specifically, domestic brand Larios sold approximately 1.4 million cases in 2017, up 12.7%, according to The Spirits Business, illustrating the competitive density Tanqueray faced in the Spanish gin market. Against that backdrop, a campaign capable of claiming cultural ownership of Seville — the city that names the product — offered differentiation that a purely performance-led approach could not replicate. Media strategy was handled by Carat, which shared agency credit alongside PS21 in award submissions, as documented by Ads of the World.
The creative execution rests on a single audacious act of measurement. PS21 constructed an algorithm capable of ingesting and analyzing visual data at city scale, processing more than 10,000 images of Seville's architecture, streets, and landmarks to isolate the dominant chromatic signature of the city, as reported by LBBOnline. The output — hexadecimal color #FFAB60, a warm amber tone — mapped directly onto the visual language of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla's bottle and brand identity, creating a correspondence between data finding and product design that felt both inevitable and engineered.
Creative directors Daya Muñoz, Víctor Blanco, and Jacobo Pérez oversaw the campaign at PS21, with art direction by Dani Aguado and copy by Roberto González, according to credits documented on ps21.works. Account management fell to Laura Igualada and Lara Martínez, with senior experience production led by Daniel Ramos, per the same source. The integration of these disciplines — data science, art direction, copywriting, and production — reflects an intentional model in which the technology and the craft were treated as co-equal authorial forces rather than separate workstreams.
The campaign's cultural anchor — Los del Río's 'Sevilla Tiene Un Color Especial' — provided the narrative frame without requiring the song to function as a conventional soundtrack. Instead, the lyric's unanswered premise became the brief. By resolving a question embedded in a beloved regional anthem and then securing Pantone's institutional validation, PS21 gave the execution a layer of civic permanence unusual in product launch advertising. Production partner Gear Seven contributed to the campaign's realization, as credited by Ads of the World. The entire campaign was expressed as a single integrated media asset, concentrating all of its argumentative force into one coherent artifact rather than diffusing it across multiple executions.
The campaign's award record provides the clearest verified measure of its industry impact. 'Searching for the Special Color of Seville' won a Silver Lion in the Creative Data category at Cannes Lions 2019, as reported by LBBOnline and Ads of the World. At Effie Spain 2019 — formally the Premios a la Eficacia — the campaign won Gold in Best Regional and Local Campaign, as documented by marketingnews.es, a result that speaks specifically to demonstrated effectiveness in the Spanish market rather than creative craft alone. In 2020, the WARC Awards recognised the campaign with a Gold for Creative Use of Data and a Partnership Award, per WARC's own published results. The campaign also received a Second Prize in Creative Use of Data at the New York Festivals Advertising Awards, according to ps21.works.
No verified performance data on sales uplift, reach figures, or media impressions for 'Searching for the Special Color of Seville' is publicly available beyond the award documentation. What the award portfolio does confirm is that the campaign achieved recognition across three distinct evaluative frameworks: creative craft at Cannes Lions, commercial effectiveness at Effie Spain, and data strategy at WARC — a combination that is structurally rare and that validates PS21's decision to treat the algorithm not as a production tool but as the campaign's primary creative argument. The Pantone certification of #FFAB60 as Seville's official color represents an outcome with durability beyond the campaign flight, embedding Tanqueray's contribution into the city's public record in Spain.
Tanqueray's 'Searching for the Special Color of Seville' is an integrated campaign published in Spain in April 2018 by agency PS21. It used an algorithm to analyze more than 10,000 images of Seville, deriving hexadecimal color #FFAB60, which Pantone certified as the city's official color to launch Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla.
PS21, a Madrid-based agency, created the campaign for Tanqueray and parent company Diageo. Media strategy was handled by Carat. The creative team was led by directors Daya Muñoz, Víctor Blanco, and Jacobo Pérez, with art direction by Dani Aguado and copy by Roberto González, according to ps21.works.
The campaign won a Silver Lion at Cannes Lions 2019 in Creative Data, as reported by LBBOnline. It also won Gold at Effie Spain 2019 for Best Regional Campaign, per marketingnews.es, and a Gold WARC Award for Creative Use of Data in 2020, plus a Second Prize at the New York Festivals Advertising Awards.
PS21 built an algorithm that processed more than 10,000 images, analyzing 30 monuments, approximately 1,000 streets, and around 600,000 distinct hues across Seville, according to LBBOnline. The process produced hexadecimal color #FFAB60, a warm amber tone that Pantone subsequently certified as Seville's official color.
The campaign is built on Los del Río's Sevillian anthem 'Sevilla Tiene Un Color Especial,' which declares the city has a special color without naming it. PS21 used that unresolved lyric as the campaign brief, deploying data to answer a question that had existed in Spanish popular culture for decades, per ps21.works.
The Clapboard Score for 'Searching for the Special Color of Seville' is 79 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative data craft and a multi-award performance across Cannes Lions, Effie Spain, and the WARC Awards, balanced against the campaign's single integrated media asset and limited publicly available performance metrics.
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