By Yohan P Chawla
Star Sports has always been known for its great cricket promotional campaigns; cricket lovers will remember the very popular MaukaMauka series, for one. They have now launched their new campaign for Unimoni Asia Cup 2018. The campaign, “Knock Knock”, is based on the creative insight that one’s neighbour’s success will always be a consistent reminder of their own failure.
Obviously focusing on the India-Pak matches, the film subtly takes on the age old “Neighbour vs Neighbour” theme and brings alive the neighbourhood rivalry in a way which is bound to leave viewers with a smile on their faces. The Knockout tournament is set start on 15thSeptember, 2018, in Dubai and will feature the Asian neighbours – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.
The entire excitement of the Asia Cup is around the two popular cricketing rivals India and Pakistan. There is a great opportunity to see these rivals battle it out in the Asia Cup tournament, and if, in the 13 days of the tournament, both teams make it to square off in the finals, there will be 3 possible India-Pak matches.
The Asia cup kicks off the cricket calendar for the Star Network. After the Asia Cup, India take on West Indies, which will be followed by India vs New Zealand, then the Women’s T20 World-Cup, the IPL and finally the much awaited 2019 ICC World Cup.
Gautam Thakkar on learnings from the recently concluded Vivo-IPL 2018, said, “Going regional with languages, and the novel innovations like Star Sports Select Dugout were thoroughly enjoyed by the serious cricket enthusiasts. We will be launching the Select Dugout for the 50-over format during the Asia Cup as well. Languages in which the Asia Cup will be broadcast are: English, Hindi and Tamil.”
Speaking about the Hotstar integration, Thakkar said, “During the IPL we had the Watch-N-Play which did really well, people who watched and played, watched twice as much. The Hotstar team is finalizing its plan of offerings for the Aisa Cup and will issue a statement very soon. But we want to continuously innovate, and the big goal is to engage users, because that is truly a two-way medium and certainly some of the numbers we saw in the IPL in terms of viewership, like 10.3 million concurrent users etcetera, are testimony to it. We are betting big on Hotstar, and interactivity is the next thing we at Star would want to invest into.”
“We are very excited about regional languages, and have already applied for licenses for languages. Our plans are ready to roll as soon as we receive the licenses, and we will launch roll out those plans real soon,” Thakkar said.
The first campaign film of the Unimoni Asia Cup 2018 has been conceptualized by the Star Sports creative communications team, and produced by Nirvana Films.
