When it comes to cricket, India is one of the countries which follow the sport almost as if it were a religion. So much so, when it is India playing against countries like Pakistan, England or South Africa amongst others in an ICC T20 World Cup, the high is altogether different.
But unlike football or basketball where the jersey culture is a vastly spread out and age-old one, cricket stands on a slight back foot. Having said that, when adidas, a brand that has predominantly been known for sponsoring football teams signed a five-year deal as the Official Kit Sponsors of the Indian Cricket Team with BCCI, the dynamics began to change, slowly and steadily.
In the yesteryears, adidas had already partnered with the Indian Cricket Team and replaced Sachin Tedulkar’s iconic MRF Bat with one of its own. But with the newly signed kit sponsorship deal, the brand had to amp up its game and go beyond jersey to make the most of the association.
And with Fundamental, the Pallavi Chakravarty, Anand Murthy and Nishant Saurabh-led ad agency, being its brand partners, what became literally ‘fundamental’ was not just the much talked about jersey launch and partnership announcement of 2023, but also a campaign showcasing the brand’s support to Indian Cricket Team in the ongoing T20 Men’s Cricket World Cup in a clutter breaking manner.
Speaking to Marketing Mind, Neeraj Kanitkar, Co-Founder and ECD, Fundamental, shared that the independent creative agency had started working on the campaign in January and presented the same to the brand in the last week of the month, a time when India had just lost the final of World Cup 2023 to Australia and people were still hurting from the wounds.
“This was a very interesting context to start the work because as an agency, we were also just coming on the back of either being briefed on, pitching for or seeing many of the various IPL campaigns at the time, which since forever have been very similar to cricket campaigns- let’s do this and let’s do that to pump it up and show support, passion, fervour and so on and so forth. But when we were speaking to the brand team of adidas, it sure did feel a refreshing change,” he said.
Delving further into the refreshing nature of the brand campaign, he mentioned that when fundamental began working on the brand campaign, it hadn’t watched the global campaign and only knew that the line- ‘You got this!’ existed in adidas’ vocabulary and so, the agency had to figure out a way to ensure that the communication somehow does fit well into the brand holistically and that too across the span of four month.
“When we had the word with adidas’ team, we were all convinced that neither of us wanted to work on a campaign which just talks about- Come on Team India win this, you deserve it or you must do this and do that. Secondly, we were also very sure that we did not want to do another campaign with a rap song in it. Hence, what we did decide was to
As part of the shoulder content for the same campaign, Kanitkar stated that the agency had come up with a 3D store video and about 20 odd pieces which were focused on just selling the jerseys, all within the one and a half hours that agencies and production teams usually get with sports stars and the clubs.
Link to the campaign–
Communicated and shot on the tunes on ‘Under Pressure’ a song by Queen and David, adidas’ campaign for ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2024, as elaborated upon by the film’s director- John Fredrick Peter Mayne, consists of a subtle nuancing of visual to the music in the initial 30 seconds in a black and white background, followed by a high of both sound and design, all leading up to easing out the audience before the revealing of Rohit Sharma, Indian Cricket Team’s captain in full glory.
As per Fundamental’s Kanitkar, it is indeed a ‘lovely way’ of setting up global campaigns because with this approach, what happens is that not only is the brand’s global communication leveraged well but also the brand’s global track is amplified, with both the script and context being king in this case.
“When it comes to cricket, our players keep feeling the pressure to perform and win as the audience has an immense amount of expectations from them and therefore what’s needed is for them also to release some of the pressure that aligns with the script and cumulative graph of our film,” he stated.
Interestingly enough, he also pointed out that since the work on the film began way before the selection of cricketers for India’s team were out, the agency and production house both shot the production assets in a way that the static post which shows all cricketers in a huddle in one frame, despite none of them coming together even for once due to their busy schedules.
“Had we shot the visuals once the team was announced, we would’ve never been able to make and complete the film for the World Cup. Hence, if it were in theory, I’d be worried if any of the players that we’d shot with had not been named in the playing team, but because the tone, tenor and the manner of the campaign was solely based on- ‘Just play and let the rest happen’. In fact, having included Rinku and Shubhman in adidas’ campaign despite knowing that the two would not make it to the playing team, we weren’t stressed and were instead receiving positive responses from the audience for the same. Moreover, I strongly believe that having more players is always merrier as everyone brings their own element to character and element to it,” he said.
Throwing light on to the scripting part of the campaign film, Kanitkar mentioned that since there are two aspects to it- the voiceover and visuals, what this film actually does is that it showcases a very positive side of the players amidst all the pressure and burden of expectations.
“When it comes to the screenplay, we wanted to ensure that we celebrate what fans, the loudest and most passionate element of the sport, bring to the table in the most positive light alongside the pressure that is there on the players. That being said, what we also wanted to showcase was the relief kicking in and therefore we showed our men in blue in the most free, fun and as normal way as possible, intentionally,” he said.
In fact, the campaign, in a first, featured cricketers playing football! Something that happens more often than not, if not always, as playing football helps players warm up before the match and in doing so, something magical happens- the players kind of forget that there’s a big match ahead of them and that they have a professional responsibility which in turn helps them release the pressure.
“We really also wanted to show a little bit of fun things like Hardik blowing for luck on the ball, something that he did in the ODI World Cup against Pakistan. Hence, writing the screenplay for this campaign seemed almost like cheating because we just looked at whatever the players did and whatever came naturally to them,” he added.
On the voiceover bit for the campaign, the idea, as per Kanitkar, was to distill the campaign’s name- ‘You Got This’ and speculate what did it mean in the context of cricket, especially from an India POV, and so happened a very weird thing wherein the last line- ‘Its just a ball. Its Just a Bat. You Got this!’ came first for this campaign unlike the usual and after that everything just felt like fill in the blanks.
“When an ad campaign involves cricketers, the basic logistical challenge is that one has to catch them when they’re free, which is for a very limited amount of time,, and therefore a complex process. But, this particular one was more complicated and what made it even more complicated was the fact that we were not just shooting a film with each player, but also shoulder content, 3D content and full fledged static,” Mayne added.
Picking up from here, Kanitkar also mentioned that a major chunk of the campaign film was shot in Dharamshala, during the gap between the fourth and fifth tests of the India-England test series and that later on, the team had also gone and shot at Mumbai’s Wankhede stadium as a result of sheer pure dumb luck.
Furthermore, Mayne, also added, “If you see the last shots of the film, where somebody is knocking on the helmet, there is nobody actually inside that but just a camera which was mounted there after cutting the helmet. And then you have the DOP holding the camera and coming towards the player, followed by the player hitting the helmet and us shuttling between the two.”
