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Harsha Bhogle serves ‘hot and spicy’ revenge to New Zealand’s Kane Williamson

Amazon Prime Video is cooking up a steaming affair for India’s ongoing tour of New Zealand.

Amazon Prime Video’s new cricket spot stands out in many ways. For starters, it resembles an actual ad, unlike the usual still cricket shots splashed across screens for 10-20 seconds, in the hope that it can satiate a viewer’s interest in a cricket series.

More importantly, it uses humour, and not forced aggression, to whip up rivalry for India’s ongoing tour of New Zealand.

Unlike Australia, Pakistan and to some extent England, the Indian cricket team doesn’t have too much of a rivalry with New Zealand, unless you count three specific incidents over the past five years.

During a particularly rough three-course meal, cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle is kind enough to remind Black Caps’ skipper Kane Williamson, one of the nicest players in world cricket today, of those instances.

Bhogle has turned revenge is best served cold on its head. One is only glad he didn’t choose to follow Arya Stark’s footsteps, when she finally dealt with Walder Frey in the Game of Thrones series.

This cricket series is also the first property on Amazon Prime Video to feature ads. It will, however, not go for an extensive splash of ads. There are only two sponsorship tiers - presenting sponsor and associate sponsors. The former will see deeper integration across the series and have higher visibility throughout.

“Over the last 10-15 years, the match-viewing experience has been diminished by the intrusion of abundant commercial messages. We’re going to present a live experience, with limited number of ads and commercial messages,” Chaitanya Divan, head of sports, Prime Video, India, told afaqs! a couple of weeks ago.

Airtel Xstream Fiber is the presenting sponsor, and MPL, Nescafé, Noise, OLX Autos and Vida are the associate sponsors. Certain premium brands, like AMFI and DBS, are also advertising during the series.

“The intention is not short-term revenue maximisation. Our number one priority is to deliver the best possible experience to both the customers and advertisers,” Divan added.

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