Billboards featuring naked British rugby players - apparently in action during a match - have been successfully grabbing media and public attention in the run-up to this year’s Six Nations. By showcasing the impressive physicality of rugby’s athletes, the campaign was using a trick that has been missed by other sports, says Sara Tate, senior planner at Mother, the agency which produced the campaign for the sports drinks brand Powerade.
Brands like sportswear companies have been guilty of putting their products at the forefront of their advertising campaigns, when “people would rather look at a picture of an incredibly successful athlete,” says Tate.
“There has been too much focus on outer gear,” she says, echoing the strapline for the Powerade promotion – ‘Inner Gear’”.
Tate puts this mistaken focus down to a ‘cultural malaise’ which has afflicted the marketing industry, and not just sports marketing. Choosing athletes’ naked bodies as an alternative object of focus is potentially controversial, but Mother has pulled it off by using photographs taken in a respectful or, to quote strategist at Mother Jonny Ng, a “reverential style”.
The photographs at the centre of the current campaign emphasise the physical power and effort that goes into training for and playing rugby – the players appear with muscles rippling, posed with rugby balls as if in action mid-game. Tate and Ng say that the treatment of the players in the images sought to focus on the players’ bodies as tools rather than, as is often the case with the use of the naked human form in advertising, as objects of sexual desire.
“It is a far cry from Sophie Dahl advertising perfume by lolling on a bed in a very suggestive way when there is absolutely no need for her to be naked,” says Tate.
The rugby campaign follows a similar set of advertisements by Mother for Powerade last year around the Beijing Olympics. Images of naked TeamGB athletes in a photographic style that made them resemble statues of Roman or Ancient Greek athletes were used as part of the ‘Inner Gear’ campaign. TeamGB cyclist Rebecca Romero was posed naked in a racing position on a bicycle, a photograph which was chosen for display at the National Portrait Gallery in London late last year.
Although the posters have been refused by advertisers such as the London Underground, and in some in-store environments, Ng says the response has been overwhelming positive. Indeed the media response to what could have been a controversial campaign has been so positive that Mother values the free media coverage generated at £1 million.
Many sports come already blessed with a source of powerful and beautiful images in the bodies of the athletes that take part. The Powerade rugby campaign has shown just how this very essential part of sport can be used in good taste to create effective marketing.
