Asian Games can never be about one specific sport: SPNI's Neville Bastawalla

As the 19th Asian Games gets ready to officially kick off in Hangzhou on 23 September, Campaign India caught up with Neville Bastawalla, SVP and head - marketing at Sony Pictures Networks India (SPNI), the official broadcaster for the event, to find out more about how the network looked to create buzz around it.

"How do we galvanise the nation to support our athletes for this multi–sporting event was the thought behind it", said Bastawalla on the campaign featuring eminent personalities from varied walks of life, including the defence forces, media and the movies, apart from sports. “That’s when we decided to approach the real heroes of the country to talk to the youth of India.”

The campaign is along the lines of SPNI’s promotion for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, ‘hum honge kamyaab’. "Then too the network had got the chief of defence staff, and a host of celebrities and industrialists onboard for the campaign," he shared.

“Everything about the Olympics campaign - the viewership, the social media and digital media engagement, went through the roof multifold with unheard-of numbers, and that became the buzziest campaign,” recalled Bastawalla.

"When our athletes came back from Tokyo, they told us that with this whole campaign, they actually felt India was backing them for the first time ever. This really motivated us and we said we will continue with this in the Commonwealth and in the Asian Games,” he added.

For the 19th Asian Games, the network followed it up with ‘phir se hum honge kamyaab’ but with an added mission 'for an aspirational target’, says Bastawalla. Thus the slogan, ‘is baar sau paar’, exhorting our athletes to aim for a 100 medals.

In previous outings at the Games, India’s highest haul so far is 69 medals, which was won at the last 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta when the country sent a delegation of 570 athletes.

On whether that puts added pressure on the athletes who are already under duress to perform, Bastawalla said, “There were people across the board calling me up saying that, ‘please don’t do this, what if we don’t do it (achieve the numbers)’. But this is our aspiration and so we put this out. That may put pressure on the athletes but it also charges them up,” he added.

This time around, India will field its largest contingent of 655 athletes across 40 different sporting disciplines.

On the campaign itself, everything was done in-house right from the writing, and producing to the directing. It features the chief of defence staff, Lt Gen Anil Chauhan along with the chiefs of tri-services from the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force. The crew got a warm reception from each of the independent chiefs of the defence forces, who extended their involvement and full support along with generous access to the crew to film on submarines, warships, and helicopters, shared Bastawalla.

The network also got ‘honorary commitments’ from all the celebrities involved in the campaign. This includes a lineup of Bollywood personalities such as Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Hema Malini, Madhuri Dixit, John Abraham, Kapil Sharma, Abhishek Bachchan, Sunny Deol and Aditya Roy Kapur and industrialists such as Gautam Singhania along with sports icons like Mirabai Chanu, Baichung Bhutia, Anju Bobby George, Raja Randhir Singh, and Zaheer Khan to name a few.

Additionally, in a first, one of the films also features 15 sports journalists.

"The kind of PR this has generated is huge", revealed Bastawalla.

He added, “This was truly the grandest Asian Games campaign ever done in our history. The whole feeling of what you get to see is so different. We are on the cusp of becoming one of the top sporting nations in the world in a few years. This was the entire thinking behind the campaign.”

The channel has a robust ‘phygital’ plan to promote the campaign, which includes social media and other digital platforms, apart from Sony network on TV. “We are not looking to tie up with any regular influencers as this is beyond any regular influencer”, said Bastawalla. “By that what I mean is that the chiefs of the army, navy and airforce are influencers, one can’t get bigger influencers than these.”

Cricket is also one of those tools the channel will be using to leverage the multi-sports property to increase its viewer base this time around. In a first for India, both the men’s and women’s Indian cricket teams are marking their debuts at this year’s Asian Games. The channel expects the inclusion of the ‘nation’s most popular sport’ to boost the viewership of the games and take it to the next level.

However, Bastawalla is clear that the Asian Games can never be about one specific sport. Were they ever tempted to promote Cricket over other sports, knowing how ‘cricket crazy’ we are as a nation?

“We are doing a separate promotion with cricket, only because it is for the first time ever that we are a part of Asian games. So we have shot with cricketers just to let people know as many aren’t aware of it,” he said before stressing that it won't be the focal point of the campaign.

“That is just 20% of the campaign on air, the rest 80% continues to be about ‘galvanising the nation’,” he added.

E-sports is another debutant at the Games this year and has been gaining prominence. However, Bastawalla discloses that viewership for e-sports in India is very low, as compared to other sports. Hence the network is not sure about its plans to cover the sport this time around.

In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in the country’s sporting landscape with emerging sports stars across varied disciplines bringing laurels to the nation, and non-cricket sports like javelin throw, badminton and chess gaining prominence.

“Today everybody in the country knows a Neeraj Chopra,” said Bastawalla. "The response from both, advertisers and viewers has been more than encouraging. We saw that three years back during the Olympics as well. And it's not limited to popular sports. The whole country was following golf for Aditi Ashok, even people who had no clue about the game were rooting for her,” he added.

The network has got sponsors across categories of automobiles, beverages, consumer durables, BFSI, to name a few. “As of now, we have eight to ten sponsors on board including Hyundai, JSW, Limca Sportz, Paisabazaar, LIC of India, Ultratech Cement, Amul, State Bank of India, Panasonic, and a lot more are expected to be onboarded before the games begin on 23 September. We have seen a huge growth in the number of sponsors as compared to the previous games,” noted Bastawalla.

With Disney Star having the Asia Cup and the ICC Cricket World Cup, and Viacom 18 bagging the BCCI India home matches for the next five years, we asked Bastawalla if there is a sense of FOMO for missing out on the massive cricket viewer base in the country.

“That is a cycle”, replied Bastawalla. “There was a time when we had the IPL, we don’t have it anymore.” He points out that right now in the Asiad they have also got cricket. “So we have both, the men and women in blue as part of the games.” And if that weren’t enough, he added, there’s Neeraj Chopra as the poster boy of Asian Games. “So we are absolutely gung-ho about this, and we are very confident that it will cross all kinds of records,” he signed off.