The coming month will see Xbox releasing its campaign around its new cricket game, showing the entire family playing cricket, while LG and Hero Honda will soon come up with new cricket campaigns. Sansui has already launched its ad with Rahul Dravid and Videocon and Samsung are expected to follow suit.

Nike hits streets

It took Agnello Dias, senior VP and executive creative director at JWT (J Walter Thompson) half an hour to come up with the “Gutsy Cricket” concept. It then took one month to shoot the film. “Though the ad has a spontaneous feel, it took us a lot of time to structure the script,” says Dias, who admits to playing cricket on the streets of Mumbai, “though, never in a traffic jam”. Dias, along with his team, planned every little detail to recreate the chaos of a traffic jam, including the man clipping nostril hair in the mirror and the statue of the Parsi gent. “This is how we actually play our cricket, rough and tough. We’ve tried to capture the phenomenon of street cricket from a first-floor view, that is, on top of a traffic jam,” says Dias. No models were used in the ad. “The idea was to use lean and mean bodies and everyday faces. Most of the faces in the ad are junior stuntmen.”

Zaheer Khan and Sreesanth are incidental and come only at the end, which is a first amongst cricket ad commercials. The script is bigger than the stars. “These cricketers believe they can play as well as the team.”

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