Neo Sports asks cricket fans to save their voice

McCann Erickson’s Mumbai office has conceptualised a new advertising campaign ahead of the India v Australia series that will be played early next month.

The campaign titled, “The championships of the Number 1s”, consists of four TVCs which will have gone on air on Neo Cricket already and will soon be aired on other channels too. 
One of the TVCs, titled, “Interrogation”, is a thirty second film which opens with a shot of an inspector grilling a thief in a typical interrogation routine. But although the inspector is shown hitting the thief, he doesn’t raise his voice while asking him about the stolen goods. Similarly, the thief also responds to the inspector’s beating in a subdued manner without the usual screaming that takes place during an interrogation. 

The TVC ends with a voiceover saying “India apni awaaz bacha ke rakho, aa raha hai Australia” followed by shots of cricket fanatics shown screaming and cheering India on, while watching a match. 
The film has been directed by Sanjay Shetty and produced by Opticus Inc. 

Commenting on the new campaign, Rahul Matthew, ECD, McCann Erickson, said, “In terms of rivalry, any series featuring these two teams is the biggest. The India-Australia rivalry has grown with every passing series, because of the level of the game the two teams play and the fights (Harbhajan-Symonds, Gambhir-Johnson, etc). So the brief we received from Neo Sports was to build up on this and gather momentum for the fan on as we build up to the series.”

“The commercials are talking to an Indian fan and we’re focusing everything on the fan itself. We didn’t use any players to build up the series, because every Indian cricket fan is familiar with them and we didn’t see the need to do that”, added Matthew.

Ashish Bahl, vice-president, marketing & communication NEO Sports, said, “This is the biggest series happening this year and we wanted McCann to build on that. This series is also a start of India’s winter schedule and the last leap before the World Cup starts. Australia also plays the Ashes after this, so in many ways it is one of the biggest series of the year. Added to this, India is the number one Test team, while Australia is the number one ODI team. So we decided to call it the ‘The championships of the Number 1s’.”

A print campaign, supported by a digital media campaign will soon be released too.

WATCH TVC now

Credits
Agency: McCann Erickson, Mumbai

National creative director: Prasoon Joshi

Executive creative directors: Rahul Mathew, Akshay Kapnadak

Creative Team: Talha Mohsin, Mahesh Parab, Vilsen Gonsalves, Prashant Kandalkar

Account Management: Parvathy Nair, Shashank Lanjekar, Rohan Parkar

Films: Zaheerali, Amol Sonawane

Director: Sanjay Shetty

Production House: Opticus Inc