CHAPTER 10WHO'S RICKY?
Choosing Ricky Ponting, Australia's cricket captain, as a celebrity ambassador to inspire women to buy vitamins may not have been the most obvious choice. After all, cricket is not most women’s favourite sport.
So why pick Rick? Because to be different we had to ‘do’ different, and being paradoxical was part of that.
The strategy behind using Ricky Ponting as an ambassador was to inspire an unfit, uninspired middle-aged man to improve his health by motivating him to ‘take what Ricky takes’. This, in turn, would motivate his wife to pop a bottle of vitamins in the shopping basket for him (and hopefully a bottle for herself as well) so they could cultivate a shared commitment to better health.
When we presented the Ricky Ponting concept to Dimi Papantoniou, the buyer at Priceline, she said, ‘Who's Ricky?’ That remark worried us a bit: if other buyers felt the same lack of engagement with our brand ambassador, the campaign could be an expensive failure. But I was certain this counterintuitive strategy was the right approach to take.
Making the deal
Looking back, it’s easy to see how all those pieces of the campaign came together. At the time, it was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picture on the box was. Here’s how the campaign unfolded.
Michael had already built a relationship with Simone Austin, the dietician from the Australian Cricket Team, so we knew the players were already using our products. We reached out ...