UP514: Inside Edge x The Big Idea: Does the advertising industry understand cricket?

0:00Richard:Hello, Richard Gillis here. Welcome to Unofficial Partner, a sports business podcast. We're going to do something a bit different today, putting together two of our series. One, the Inside Edge series about the business of cricket with Mike Jakeman. And then the other is The Big Idea with Simon Moore, where we talk about creative in sports marketing and advertising. The subject is cricket and what happens to cricket when it's filtered through the advertising industry? What are the cliches and tropes that we see regularly attached to the sport? and how are those changing and what the difference is between how cricket shows up in India and Indian-based campaigns versus those in England and other countries.

0:36Richard:I asked both Mike and Simon to bring along what they see as good and bad examples of cricket-based advertising and then we get into it. I hope you enjoy it, it's fun.

0:51Richard:This is like the two worlds coming together. So Clark and Well the other day, which again is one of my favourite haunt. I like this because it's sort of collaboration between two co-hosts. I've never done this before. I think this is the future. Mashing things together. A creator collab. Which ones are we going to discuss? I think definitely the Nike, Top of the Bosses thing. I really like that. Yeah, I think as many as we can. I should introduce both of you again. Mike Jakeman, Inside Edge, co-host. I don't know whether this is an episode of Inside Edge or an episode of The Big Idea, but anyway we'll say hello to both of you hi mike hi richard i'm looking for i'm looking forward to this mike you're going to be tested on your advertising creative chops it could be that i've been in the wrong business for all this time this could be standing on the precipice of something really exciting or it could be exposed simon and simon welcome to you also i remember simon so there's i'll just give a bit of context for this go and this is going back quite a while me and cypher worked for cake at the time and there was a cricket world cup and it might have been a women's cricket world cup but we did we did some yeah did some sort of stuff on that didn't we and and it was really successful and i remember going into the tube at it must have been embankment or somewhere around there and the creative was plastered it did one of those drenches on the whole of the underground and so the work that i'd i'd first seen on simon's on sort of laptop or on his computer screen suddenly across town and it was really quite a thing i you know having not been in i'm not obviously a creative advertising person that was quite a thrill i thought do you remember that yeah no i think that's the first time that happens here and for me it was for queer as folk for channel four at the end of the 90s and i walked out caledonia road tube and there was my work and i was like gobsmacked big 96 sheet it was just like wow and then that wears off pretty quickly you know that's just another billboard it's a bit like it was exciting it's a bit like your first byline isn't it that's always quite exciting as well and this it is true that those things probably do diminish over time it's impossible i mean i imagine it's also like scoring your first test hundred like you know you value all of them but some are gonna stand out first cut is the deepest as someone once said do you know that Steve Redgrave story about him winning golds over a series of different Olympics and like the first you know the first after the first one he said he was like just high off it for about six months he was like so excited and then the second one it was a month the third time it was like a week and then like with that you said the last time he got a gold as he was crossing the line he was thinking why am I still doing this literally as he was winning the gold he was like why am I bothering with that yeah yeah well you can imagine because rowing is quite a sort of I played golf with Steve Redgrave once and uh yeah it was really interesting but he he did say after a while you are just doing the same thing for 25 years you know it's not like football or cricket there are dimensions to it you are in a boat or you're in a on a ergo and you're going back and forward and pulling it it's quite a narrow range of sort of movement as well you'd have to be so strong psychologically i suppose which again is one that's the reason i've never i haven't got five gold medals frankly yeah well i was gonna say his his olympics followed the same trend because he did all this work on the ergo and then got given a gold medal he never had it any other way that story was told by john lloyd do you know john lloyd the guy who created like yeah yeah blackadder and all that kind of stuff yeah like and uh you know he had all this success and then he lost basically lost it in the early 2000 it might be in late 90s or early 2000 he just kind of lost it completely and was like i've wasted my life it's what you know he's got like this wall full of awards and was like just what what a waste of time but then sort of pulled himself back to get a really good QI so not all bad and again without going on too much of a tangent jonathan edwards again is interesting on this because obviously he was a he sort of lost god at a religious upbringing and then he was at one of the olympics and he said you know is there more to jumping into a sandpit you know and that he sort of if you could make that sound even more ridiculous then shit i've been i've spent my life jumping into a sandpit i mean it's but you know very well and a long long way into the sandpit but still jumping into a sandpit okay i'm gonna just we need to i'm gonna set this up a little bit because the idea behind this and it's not a complicated one but i was i was reading there's a couple of new bits of work that before we sort of dive into cricket's relationship with the idea and creative advertising and what happens to cricket in that process before we do that there is a couple of things one i saw a nice substack called sportsverse and i'll give him a name check his name is daniel york miller and i think he used to be a writer on the business of fashion but he's got a really nice sport meets fashion substack newsletter and he flagged something a new nike campaign under it's called nocta which is again new this is new to me you two might be sitting there bedecked in nocta gear for all i know but nocta is nike's street wear focused sub-label in partnership with drake which i think you know if that's a sentence i was i've never really sort of i can't remember ever saying but it released its latest collection the 425 cardinal stock capsule again these are all words is an ode to Antiguan cricket culture with the campaign featuring the fictitious Nocta Cricket Association and displaying street and grassroots cricket scenes on the Caribbean island where it was shot the clothing is an interesting blend of Nocta's stripped down approach to street wear with cricket's traditional all-white uniform so and there's some very nice imagery and photography but I sent that around to you two thinking okay there's something here and the other one was there is a new bit of work by Homeground who have been on the podcast relatively recently and they the client was Beats and again it was a cricket themed piece of creative bit of advertising nice film and with and I think it was Shubman Gill as the cricketer in the in the creative I might be wrong about that actually but anyway it was a it was a famous modern Indian cricketer and I just thought that was again two things there probably doing two different jobs but I wonder what the history of cricket and advertising is so then I then came to you two and said okay give me a list of your favorite cricket campaigns ad campaigns and we will then go through and say yes we like that one don't like that one and generally have a chat about the relationship between cricket and creative so that's where we are so simon moore award-winning i have to do i do i have to use that phrase all the time when you say that literally like anyway you can say that that's that but that's being self-deprecating just performative self-deprecation i think that's what that is that's you're saying oh no oh no don't keep mentioning my awards please stop saying it so talk to me about cricket what before we get into specific campaigns yeah cricket comes in the door of an advertising agency then what what do we think just give me a top line on where your head might go and ultimately we'll get to quite a lot of cliches hanging around and and do we want to play in the cliches or do we want to counter the cliches and that's always a question anyway what do you think well i think that there's a danger when it when cricket walks in the door there's a danger that you do it you treat it like rugby or football and you do that kind of list of moments that I put you know I put in an email to you which was kind of the standard kind of sport advertising which kind of goes changing room moody close-up probably a bit of sweat dripping down black and white and then the slow walk into the arena up the tunnel tension silence some kind of flashback to when they were child playing the sport against in the street.

9:33And then like suddenly this kind of moment, this kind of the crowd all gasts and waits and then the goal or the strike or the, you know, whatever it is. And the crowd roars and the logo pops up and it's, you know, it's an ongoing cliche in rugby and football. And there's the danger that you do that with cricket. And I think cricket is more interesting than that. I think it's a, it's a more unusual game, but I understand that you want to sell to punters and they like these things so why not sell it like that so that's the danger I think is you want to like you know just talking about that sort of fictitious cricket club cricket authority that they thought of I really like that idea there's not enough works of in advertising in general there's not enough works of fiction you know there's kind of too much fact and kind of real life and not enough kind of like strange funny little stories that we can kind of get behind and that's especially true in sport and i realize that because in sport sport is full of heroes and you kind of want to make them the star but i kind of think you can play more if you've got a fiction there you go that's my take that's my hot take mike come in on this anything there you want to pick up on so the the three of us have been watching this series of adverts, TV adverts by Nike in India.

10:52They were all released during the 2010s. And there are some common themes to these, which I'll sort of summarize quickly what they look like. So there's lots of urban scenes, there's lots of fast editing. This is, you can tell I'm not an advertiser, so please jump in with the correct terminology. Award-winning Simon Moore. There's one where some Indian cricket fans on the way to the game or on a bus, there's a traffic jam, so of course a cricket match breaks out on the top of all of the vehicles in the traffic jam there's another one where this just shows scenes from cricket matches so village cricket matches uh my damn cricket matches professional cricket matches all jump and the the cuts are all extremely fast which show you like a bowler running in except there's actually 20 different bowlers but the actions are very kind of repeatable etc what i'm saying about these is that they are all designed to make to emphasize certain things about cricket which is that it is a physical sport uh it requires like a lot of exertion it's very tough it's very you can see like muscles flexing and the physical effort this is like tough professional sport in a way that you know this uses to me lots of very familiar tropes from as you said football rugby also athletics like anything that kind of establishes like the physical demands of sports is then being applied to cricket which I find interesting because it ignores the fact that cricket has a sort of a reputation as being a little bit different to those sports in that it is quirky it's traditional it can be played by people of all ages perhaps you know some professional cricketers do not look like these athletes from these other sports but that's completely ignored in favor of we need to pushed the angle that this is a very physically demanding, tough sport.

12:45So although I liked them in terms of the fact that they're beautifully shot and extremely well edited, and they are genuinely exciting things to watch, I feel like the crickerness of cricket was toned down in favour of making this sport seem slightly more generic. now what I find particularly interesting is that these this series of films was all made for broadcast in India and in a way you sort of I feel like this is a common argument you perhaps need to convince fans in Europe or America of like cricket this genteel sport can be really exciting and can be really physical but surely if there's a market in the world that knows what the you know what cricket looks like it's it's India and these films could all have been shot by like paul greengrass the kind of the born and united 93 filmmaker like you know they're really kind of visceral um so i find that quite interesting that they chose to take that approach in india but what do you guys think i think india is a key question in all of this because it's

13:51Richard:why cricket question you very quickly that just solves that straight away in a way that it doesn't for the drake nike stuff or it doesn't for you know an english audience or an awesome you know so cricket is just so central to the cultural story that it plays the role of football in india so again there's a and i saw in some of the nike work obvious crossovers to some of the famous football ads like there's a nike ad from the airport where they're yeah i was gonna say that you know game of football breaks down ronaldo yeah and so there was a sort of and the cuts are very similar so it felt like a the bones of it or the structure of the the thing had echoes of that and whether or not that was you know again it's whether that's a cliche or an homage you know it's the line but so india and cricket there's a sort of different game going on culturally i think in terms of the the medium and then and the way in which cricket is being used the other bit to it i thought was quite interesting was the you're right about the sort of physicality of it quite often what i liked about those nike ads was actually it centered on the cricket it's the same with the pepsi ads actually and that we'll talk about those separately but the sometimes when a sport and particularly cricket comes in the room and i do remember this and I've mentioned this a couple of times on the podcast it's there is a or we can't go route one we can't talk about the cricket the sport we have to find some other reason or other territory and in cricket you very quickly get to sort of culture and food is one that you know and just the color of the Indian dress or you then take it around the world with Australia England West Indies South Africa all these interesting countries but you then lapse into national stereotypes quite often you know you get Australians with cork hats and you know so I think Simon it comes to I'm trying to think what causes the problem when problems arise and it might be to do with a lack of confidence in the product of the sport itself to take the weight of the campaign and there's also I think a lack of there's a distance between the people making the ads and the people watching cricket and I think that's there's been a problem with football over the years in terms of the representation of football fans anyone who's been to a football match you wouldn't recognize the sort of building society version of a football fan in their advertising it's not real and so there is that distance but what do you think about that in terms of just the that getting in the head of the creative whilst thinking about at arm's length what cricket is so i think there's a number of things here within india cricket is the everyman sport and it's not in this country it's posh people's sport fundamentally that's a controversial statement the ecb i've got a hotline to the ecb simon and the phone is now buzzing i'll have a little chat with them because that's what it is if you ask the average person on the street it's it's a very middle class thing to both watch and participate in and and i know i think that's a shame i don't i don't agree with that like i think can i just interrupt you there i think yeah and again i'm not the ecb line on this would be and i'm not representing the ecb i i like to sort of pose questions of the ECB as much as anything else.

17:36Richard:But I think that is an example of an advertiser's view of a cricket, what cricket is. I don't think that's real. I think cricket is a far more democratic sport than you have just articulated. I don't see, that's not me saying that. I think they have made huge strides in making it very democratic. And I think it is way more democratic than it was. But fundamentally, if you went to the average personal street... It might be, sorry, again, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I think it's less democratic than it was. It was always very democratic, played by every part of society in England, but is probably less so now.

18:21Richard:But it's still actually not the sort of private school cliche that the sort of Etonians and Harrow playing at Lord's sort of vibe. Yeah, okay. I mean, if I walk through Chalkwell Park, which is near as part to me, which has Southend Cricket Club in the middle of it, and I walk past that on a day when they're playing the game, the type of people that are gathered around watching that game is a certain demographic that is different to the demographic that will be stood around the football pitch watching the kids play football. okay it's a very different type of person and i think you know you yes you might be right there's plenty of people enjoying the day out at lords as a treat or whatever because they're always worried to go to the cricket but i think as generally as cricket across the country that is enjoyed by middle classes i i you know and i don't think that's an advertiser's take i think that's an honest observation of kind of look at the people going to these things that i'm not and i'm not objecting to that what i'm saying is it's not an everyman's ball and that's not i've got I have Mike's view on this.

19:23You could both be right in the sense that I think cricket's reach is greater than people give it credit for. But at the same time, what we're talking about here is tropes that people associate with cricket. So there's a difference between what it is and its reputation. And that's, you know, when you're Simon speaking to cricket's reputation and you, Richard, are speaking to what cricket is.

19:53Richard:Simon is in many ways the sort of every man of the metropolitan elite advert that populates advertising agencies. It's unbelievable. I don't even know why I come on here anymore. so what what what we've what i need an advertising person to answer for me is how much advert like adverts should or should not or have to lean on quick tropes for recognition and all of all of the ones in cricket in england at least tend to be not the gritty physical flexed muscles stuff that i talked about earlier on but the genteel time for tea stuff that simon's leaning on well we should say that one of the things in our list is yorkshire tea everything stops for tea is the one you're referencing 2013 and that by comparison to the nike thing you know it's a stark comparison but you again you are looking at a version sorry i interrupted you so you want to come back on i think it's a really interesting question this gets to sponsorship as well because actually have they bought the cliche you know because if you buy rugby if you buy cricket if you buy football you are buying the cliche probably and you don't actually want a sort of strategy and insight desk an advertising agency say no actually it's broader than that and they say no sort of i want the cliche that's what i'm an insurance company and i want the rugger bugger from twickenham so i think that at the heart of this is who are you going after who are you're hoping to sell to and are you going after cricket fans in which case it's a particular approach or are you trying to pull in new cricket fans in which case it's a very different approach and if you're trying to pull in new cricket fans the easiest way to do that is to go to the language of sport they already love and go this is not that far away from sport you already love football and rugby however if you wanted to appeal to cricket fans as a you know the thing all the things that those people love like stopping for tea and test match special and all that kind of stuff you want to play in that area because you're wanting to talk to them about the thing they love and join in and be part of the thing they love and those are those are two very different things you know when we did women's world cup you know we were looking to pull in it's it's we're looking to pull in families and women and all that kind of like whole new markets to into cricket that's a very different premise to go until you want to make it look exciting and dynamic and you know and challenging and kind of breaking the rules and all that kind of stuff whereas you know if i was trying to sell something to cricket fans probably a different approach in fact at the same time we did another we did another major men's tournament it was it wasn't the world cup but it was something like that and we did all that as sort of i mean this is going back a while now this sounds like the biggest cliche in the world but we did it all as marvel comic book sort of style we had all these We had all these reportages of the match done kind of within two days.

22:59They were up on massive walls and these kind of what happened in the match kind of thing. I've done a kind of Marvel comic book strip. Yeah, no, I remember that. Can you tell us, Simon, about the Women's World Cup strategy and what you did then? Because if this is taking the let's draw new people into cricket, this is a good example of one approach that you discussed previously. I tell you, I tell you, like, honestly, we were struggling with it for ages and it was a classic one of those ones where I went out for a fag and had a blinding moment of inspiration. And it was, it was the, round about the time of, well, just a short while after Beyonce had done Who Runs the World with the answer being girls.

23:40And I thought that was quite interesting. And at the same time, it was that, God, what was her name? The woman that came before Boris. I can't remember her name.

23:49Richard:Theresa May. Running through the fields of wheat. Theresa May. Theresa May was prime minister. it was looking like Hillary was going to be the president of the US and Merkel was up for re-election in Germany all in the kind of same year and it was like okay so this is kind of like this is women running the world is kind of like a thing and we've got the world runs in there so the Bionti was who run the world and we changed it to who runs the world with no answer to that and it just became like a big statement of who runs the world and then we had this like great line up of all the captains and it you know it just really it just popped it looked really good shot it really well we had a kind of pr story as well of like because we shot them all in the in the long room at lord's and obviously that's a place for a long time that women couldn't be in there at all so that was kind of quite a decent you know i think it ended at the end of the 90s but it still sort of felt kind of punchy to have all these women lined up in the long room you know looking kind of like yeah we're taking on the establishment we're changing things and it's fit the news agenda of the time so that's what we did do we need to make a distinction here between advertising campaigns that are selling cricket and advertising campaigns that are using cricket to sell something else so we mentioned nike selling sports yeah clothing versus the strategy that you use to sell the sport yes i think we do and also i think there's a sort of a further distinction between the endemic brands and the non-endemic brands so for example what i mean by that is is the sort of if you're if they're nike adidas puma they are in embedded in the sport at particular times nike have come in and out of cricket it's mainly about india and the india market normally it's increasingly there's an american angle to this as well which i think is quite interesting talks to our previous conversations about you know cricket in america and future conversations but if you look at the sort of history of brand campaigns from the endemics you've got nike obviously we just talked about yards just do it the nocta drake stuff adidas is wall cricket which again was a sort of 2013 and normally around big icc moments and events puma sock them viracoli partnership they are sort of expected to be absolutely embedded in the sport and they know sport better than any of the others better than a building society better than pepsi coke better than you know a hotel brand or a cup you know a tea brand whatever so and it's easier frankly for them to tell that story with authenticity than it is for you know tea so it's a harder job well simon you talk to talk to this in terms of the job the difference between an endemic and non-endemic brand in you know in terms of making those connections because quite often you then get to some the the sort of reason for being there has to be explained and that is where quite often you get quite sort of cliched like the let's talk about booking.com which was a pretty dull ad but you can see how it how they got there but it's it's very straight straight back there i go yeah it is but it's i mean it it tells me nothing does it i mean it absolutely is interchangeable i think the things about nike and adidas do now they bring a cool anyway to, even if you don't like, even if you've got no interest in cricket, you kind of go, that's kind of quite a cool ad because they bring all of their legacy already of all of that great advertising they've done.

27:26You know that they're doing, immediately it has that sense of presence that is, you know, powerful, punchy stuff. Whereas Booking.com doesn't have that. And it's very, I think that ad is very much an afterthought, that Booking.com ad is like, oh my God, we've sponsored this. what do we do now and not they've not really thought it through but but i think you compare

27:47Richard:that to emirates so emirates had the same job and basically the same job is think of an airline when you think you know around a cricket event they've they've done a deal and you know the job of creative has landed at the desk of someone like you they've come with and again it's become it was successful initially it's when the i remember talk when we when we were pitching for for women's cricket i remember we looked at it thinking god this is this is a brilliant idea just just really well thought through they're kind of married three things that wouldn't necessarily have gone together previously that that you know done done really really well and the emotion we need to uh help out our listeners here by uh just describing these two so do you want to have a bash with that simon yeah so booking.com is kind of like uh man with his father enjoying the cricket team's doing quite well he thinks oh my goodness let's get him to the final or whatever it is and so suddenly they're transported to halfway across the world to the cricket and then they're strolling through the lobby of their hotel and having to run into a famous player who I don't know who that is but it doesn't really matter it's an interchangeable famous player who sort of nods nods at them and they're all excited.

29:04It's absolutely meaningless. Whereas Emirates... Maybe a risible scene as well where they find themselves at the ground watching the game and of course one of them catches the ball from their seat. As happens every single time anyone ever goes to the cricket school. Of course, yeah. I'd forgotten about that bit but yes, that is another awful bit of it. Whereas Emirates took this approach of like, let's teach audiences by having our flight attendants go onto the pitch and teach the audiences how to celebrate various different types of scoring moments within the game through their classic sort of airline demonstration and mix into that a Bollywood celebration at the end of it.

29:50So if it's a six, we do this. And they did sort of some Bollywood dance style moves. and it was it it looked sort of joyous and fun it looked like the crowd were enjoying it was sort of like a half-time entertainment thing but it kind of blew up way bigger than that and became this this really great little moment that was kind of like yeah you you knew you you picked out the thing about rather than going booking.com do you know you can book hotels on booking.com it's like everybody knows that you're telling people nothing whereas they went we've got really great flight attendants we're not going to talk about planes or where you can go we've just got really great flight attendants they're they're really good at you know doing stuff and so it's a really smart

30:30Richard:response it is it's also i wrote the word joyous down as well when i watched it and and and i thought it's important that people don't forget that isn't it because actually it's it's odd that sometimes sport becomes less interesting when it goes filtered through advertising it should be the other way around shouldn't it i mean it's the joy and fun and okay competition and whatever all of these things that's what the whole point of it is so i agree with you i and i wasn't expecting to because i think it might be that i've seen a few iterations of that since right but that one i really struck me as i really liked it and it was really fun it felt one of the things is it's not trying to do too much is it it's not trying to go oh you it's not trying to explain how much more leg room you get on an emirates flight or how our planes are 97 punctual or any or any of those kind of like messages that clients are often desperate to crowbar in to something because this is really important that people know this because we're the best at this.

31:25They've gone, we just got great flight attendants, so let's go and do something joyous with them. And it really works for that because it's not trying to oversell you. Whereas booking.com is basically trying to explain how booking a holiday works, which I suspect we're all kind of probably pretty good at by now. It's also setting you up to fail because there is never an occasion where I'm sat at home and thinking, gosh, in a few clicks, I'd really like to be watching a major sporting event and everything falls into place. It's quickly in the garden that happens, which also has another sin, which is entirely unrealistic depictions of the sport itself, which I also don't like.

32:01And to me, that's an instant, as a sports journalist, is an instant red flag of someone who doesn't really get the brief. If you show me an unrealistic scene of the sport, if it's hammy and intended to be like that, and we can talk about cabarets in a minute, yeah perhaps as a lead off from this then that's fine because it's all you know done with a wink and a nudge yeah and it's a shared joke but when it's supposed to look slick and realistic

32:26Richard:and it isn't then i'm just offended well i think i think that comes to the sort of again it it talks to do they know the audience do they know the sport are they guessing or do they know you know and i think that there is someone in the emirates strategy team knows cricket and it it wasn't and it didn't overplay its role it there was a joke there that i understood and got and it was they had fun with it and i reward them for that because i carried on watching and and said yeah okay i like that whereas i punish them severely by not spending my money on you know if they if they displease me it's my role it's my role as consumer let's talk about cabarees then so the cabarees one again is it was odd and what i couldn't work out there's two ads simon again you set it up for us because first i saw the later one 2021 good luck girls so that's weird that's really weird and then you show me the other one which was from the 90s and i i thought okay well it's again is it a homage or is it just lazy but just talk to me about it well there was a there was an ad made for cabris at the end of the 90s where there's a player playing, he wins, and a woman sort of wafts onto the pitch to celebrate with him whilst clutching a bar of cabbage dairy milk and sort of evades security.

33:46Richard:Sort of wrestles with a policeman or an army official of some sort. I think he's a policeman. But it's very odd. But it's kind of like, I think it probably fits very well culturally with a kind of Bollywood cinema type moment where you're far more likely to see that sort of slightly larger than life kind of semi-danced thing that we we still go i don't well i still go i don't really understand this i quite like it but i don't really understand it and what they did in 2021 was they remade that with a women with a woman cricket player and a man in the crowd eating the chocolate and then doing a similar kind of dance onto the pitch which is quite funny to actually say culturally india has changed this much in that time so that's kind of like quite significant thing for them and we're acknowledging our own history and kind of having a bit of fun with it and playing with it and i think if that's we don't i i certainly don't know but if that's got a lot of kind of legacy in india like i don't know shaken back woman or something in the uk you know you kind of go like that's sort of quite funny and playing with it because it's sort of frame by frame as well isn't it and you know it's it's a sort of exactly yeah As I said, I think it's like the Ghostbusters approach it.

34:59Let's make exactly the same film, it's just reverse all the gender roles in it. And that's what they did. Those two adverts, I urge you, dear listeners, to look in the show notes where Richard's linked to these two. Watch them in the correct order, because these things will make a lot more sense. But anybody who's ever watched any of the classic Bollywood films, Lagarn is the one that comes to mind, and is familiar with the way that cricket is depicted. there will see instant echoes in the original advert and the fact that it has been so lovingly frame by frame recreated including the the evasion of security by the originally female later male uh partner of the player is i mean it's it's just done so well i would urge you to spend two minutes

35:47Richard:of your time watching those pepsi yes so i watch these and again it's it's really interesting the football comparison so that again the structure of it they are there's a coke pepsi thing in the same way as a nike adidas thing around cricket and you know in india as there is in football in Europe you know that's always in play and quite often it's on a from a sort of sponsor strategy perspective it's the sort of official versus unofficial line Adidas always have the official rights to the World Cups Nike always ambush or they always go via the players so the player route and Pepsi had a campaign called nothing official about it which was a sort of to do with and this is 96 so we're going back a long time it was an indian world cup in in the mid-90s and it was it was the sort of rebel position as opposed to you know the the coke official position and but again structurally the ads mirror those of football there is something going on what i liked about them it might be the my distance from india and culturally and you know the understanding there is a bit the setup was something happens with a famous cricketer whether it's ms dhoney or dill shan and kevin peterson or even billy bowden the umpire was in there at one point and who by the way simon you won't but has a famous crooked finger i got that and he registered that i remember he hit his trademark which talks to the potentially the ego of the umpire but that's the side issue so you've got these these setups with those famous players which then get played out in a cricket sort of environment it's the karate kid isn't it it's the karate kid going wipe on wipe off wipe on wipe off and then suddenly he's very good at defending in the karate match that's the kind of that's the premise of it is take a an everyday action and actually when it comes to the cricket match now you're brilliant at this thing so one of them is like flicking a piece of cloth over his shoulder isn't it and then suddenly he's great and the dill shan scoop the ball behind him and stuff.

37:56So, you know, it's kind of like this, it is pure karate kid, but I thought it was brilliant, actually. I think it's like all of the campaigns we've looked at, you know, jointly between us all. I thought that one was the one that sort of says it's very grounded in cricket, it's very grounded in the game, only cricket could do it. I mean, it sort of, you know, it sort of felt, it just felt really good. It felt spot on for kind of like extolling the virtues of cricket and enjoying the game at the same time and making it look exciting and dynamic. Mike, Pepsi or not Pepsi? The slogan of that series was change the game, wasn't it?

38:37Which I quite like the fact that this campaign hit on innovation, as in cricket is, which it has a much more sort of thrusting, forward-thinking reputation in India compared to England or Australia anyway. But it definitely builds on that. This is a game that is changing and is innovating and is using as the setup for these adverts. Just using the everyday put through the brain of a cricketer leads to these crazy new shots and or even umpiring decisions. So I liked the fact that it is thinking of cricket as something that's alive and receptive to the world around it, as opposed to what are these tropes from this game that we can dredge up to sell something else, i.e.

39:25Booking.com.

39:25Richard:Yeah, I think it's sort of interesting comparing those Pepsi ads for the India market with Kit Kat and Yorkshire tea to the English market, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. How much more exciting cricket appears in India than it does to the English consumer? On the Pepsi Change That Game one as well, they managed to work the product in on quite a few of them in a way that didn't feel awful. And I thought that was sort of quite smart as well. Because obviously, you know, if you're Nike, you've obviously got an immediate role in the game, whereas Pepsi, you really haven't. And so, like, I thought that was super good to be able to work the product into it.

40:04But yes, to go back to your point on the issue of Yorkshire Tea and KitKat. I'll do KitKat. Go on, you go. I'll do KitKat. it's my single favorite of all of them and the reason for that is just pure simplicity so again a quick pricey of what happens you're watching through a stump cam which is a sort of instantly recognizable view from any any sort of cricket fan and you see the two batsmen it's the end of the over one that comes down the pitch they have a chat you don't hear anything they're in the middle of a of a what looks like a test match because they're in or at least a first class game because in white it looks realistic and then one of them reaches down into their pad and pulls out a kit kat where and then breaks off two of the four fingers gives half of them to the other batter and there's like a sort of half second where you see the kit kat wrapper and the slogan obviously is like have a break because that's the existing strap line that's been there forever and then they eat the kit kat and that's it and the whole thing is done in about 20 seconds and that that but it's shot in quite a leisurely way.

41:10And this is literally a break in play, which fits in perfectly with the brand's message. It feels authentic, completely authentic, actually, which obviously is something that I've mentioned before, bothers me when it's not. I loved it because it was so simple and it didn't feel like there was any heavy lifting having to be done by the advertisers to squeeze the product into cricket. It's so idiosyncratic that there are plenty of cricketers I've watched who could quite conceivably have a Kit Kat shoved down their pad. or may have eaten plenty during the team interval. I mean, it's just, it's entirely fitting of the game, its idiosyncrasies.

41:46It was done very authentically. I was completely sold. I thought it was brilliant. They should make some Kit Kat style pads, shouldn't they? See, you've gone too far.

41:56Richard:It would work, wouldn't it? But no, the whole point, yeah, it would work actually. But the whole point, I agree. It was weirdly authentic as in I was watching it and I'm a cricket fan. and i was trying to work out how they'd done it because actually normally it's so obviously not real but that felt like you know is that a game or you know have they actually done that and i loved the just the throwaway element of the branding the red you know and i've wondered simon whether it's so there's a question i had about can you only do subtle if you're really really famous if you are kitkat and the joke is embedded in that and whether or not you could do that as a new it take a lot of balls to come in and do something or assume the audience would understand going on you can yeah you i don't think you could do that if you were a new you've got to build that heritage of have a break so that's decades of advertising you've got to have a very recognizable product yeah you can't you couldn't just do i mean it'd be meaningless wouldn't it people would go what you know i mean this yeah you've got to be recognized if you just pulled out a twix and ate a twix it would just be someone's eating yeah yeah someone's eating twix on camera yeah it wouldn't you know you have to have that kind of should have gone to spec savers kind of recognition moment that kind of makes it all kick in and work otherwise i think people just wouldn't get it okay and the tea yorkshire tea again just explain this because you like this one si i i did a thing i remember i'm always interested when they go behind the scenes and it's quite often the tea lady and again this goes to a very i remember having meetings where people say what about they go they don't want to do the star route yeah they want to do the guy they want to white line yeah and it's quite often a sort of intel computer behind the scenes power from within yeah and it ends up we do this in football and cricket where there's a sort of elevation of the tea lady as the sort of central character to this which is a thing in itself a trope in itself but why do you like this so much because i sort of well didn't really oh yeah okay so i like this because i like this because i feel like it's got lots of legs and is something you can sustain over quite a long period of time.

44:28You're absolutely, like, you're 100 % grounded in the brand because, you know, there is this kind of moment of stopping for tea. But you can do something that goes, it's basically, they ran Bake Off, basically, for the tea moment during cricket. It's more intense purposes than Bake Off, isn't it?

44:45Richard:Yeah. But, you know, it's kind of like, it's exploring all those little everyman stories. It's going behind the scenes. it's making cricket look more like it's not just the test match at Lord's or the Oval it's kind of like small little towns somewhere where people are pulling together and they've only got like a bit of a hut but they still managed to bring out the sandwiches I think there's something quite nice quite whimsical and Mike Lee-ish about it, you know, that kind of, it's got a bit of kind of joy to, again, it's got a little bit of joy to it I think, where, you know, and I think they did the right, they brought in Michael Vaughan didn't they as one of the judges and it's just something that can run.

45:24That might be why I didn't like it. I had to do a recording with Michael Boyle and he was very pleasant. So for that, I think it had something which you could then run over a really long period of time and as a campaign, they knew where they were going, they knew what the end goal was, and they've got lots of... When I did when I was at Mischief, we used to do a thing called Shed of the Year for... It was great. Shed of the Year was like, honestly, Shed of the Year was massive. You used to get a double page spread. The finalists would get a double page spread in the Daily Mail. I mean, that's, it was massive.

45:56Absolutely huge.

45:57Richard:I love a shed as well. Yeah, it was for Cupernal and they sponsored it. That's a great idea. They didn't, they didn't, it was invented originally by this guy who'd set up a website to run it. A website called Reader's Sheds. I think it's even funny. but he'd run he'd run this competition for a couple of years called shed of the year and then and then cupid all picked it up and we sort of ran it for a long time and there was something really nice about kind of ordinary people and their kind of you know their sort of their quirkiness and their individuality and i think that's probably what appealed to me about it the the thing again okay let's just talk about this for a second so the running in you know the this is in the social media age which makes me sound like my granddad so in the platform era of TikTok and Twitter or X or whatever, you've got this phenomena of the advert, the TV ad as a thing.

46:54Richard:And it sits in the context of that, you know, in a way that, okay, I can sit and watch those Pepsi ads. I can see the Nike ads. They exist as a capsule in their own right. They're classic 30 second TV ads in many ways. And that's the deal. You watch the ad and, you know, whereas obviously now a 360 24 7 always on campaign will that will be just part of the inventory that is then created and then you've got this sort of noises off going on go and make go do a bake-off competition go to whatever there's a pr element to it that the ad itself is blown up across earned media traditional media talk to me about this because it's not a cricket question but there is a sort of does it ever work question that i've got my head i could imagine this shit let's get on the you know the let's get the likes up on whatever the out you know where where we're pointing people to go and do a bake-off of cricket teas there better be something happening there because the client is going to be cross if there isn't we've created a sort of false promise just talk to me about that relationship between the classic creative idea as encapsulated in a tv ad and then all this other stuff that has to happen now as part of a sort of social campaign well i don't i don't think it has to happen but i think if you're looking to cut through what is a very busy busy media then having a campaign which can exist in lots of places which can be written about as a story because it's a worthwhile story and also can run as a tvc and also as something experiential that people can go and do and and actually you can touch people in lots of you can hit people in lots of different touch points then i think you have a much more successful campaign because you're you're going across much broader media and that's always the most success i've seen with anything has been that where it's managed to kind of hit people in different places and therefore it starts some of it starts to join up doesn't always join up but certainly like when i've done that in the past things like national trust and dulox and things like that you know it's sort of it's really started to ladder up because you're doing lots of different things dotted around and what does the i might be being too cynical here but probably does he does the experiential element i mean there is a sort of is it real or is it a confection so when i see you know a look at this experiential element to this campaign and it's full of bright young things in a bar drinking stuff of the client's you know product is that real or is that does it have to be real or is that just another front that just has to be a box that has to be ticked i think if it's bright young things in a bar it's probably heavily constructed but i think experiential can be lots of stuff you know i did a we did a lovely campaign years ago at mischief for for the national trust with john cooper clark and as part and it was all about people's memories of the coast and as part of that we sort of built a giant shell that you could go into and hear all these sounds of the sea and then write down your own memories of the coast when you were a kid kind of on a on a postcard and submit that to what actually was, so John Cooper Clark wrote the first half of the poem and then we canvassed people's memories and all that kind of stuff and then he wrote the second half of the poem.

50:28And that's not bright young things in a bar, that's people down on the South Bank or in Albert Square in Manchester kind of wandering through and going, oh, what's this? And they go in there and they can sort of smell the sea and they can hear it roaring and all that kind of, you know, and they're having memories and I think that's quite a legitimate thing. I mean, you know, at the same time there were postcards at National Cross Properties where people could, without anything experiential, where they could just submit. And there was a TVC and there was also, you know, there was like lots of different touch points.