The Hundred launches new season
Armoury director Will Innes Smith takes on The Hundred in this new campaign.
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The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) launches the sixth season of The Hundred, following its most successful year yet for ticket sales, with a new campaign designed to bring more people than ever to the tournament; in the stadium and on TV.
The campaign positions The Hundred as unmissable viewing for the whole family, with every match framed as an episode in "the most dramatic show on TV."
Season Six launches into one of the most competitive sporting summers The Hundred has faced, alongside major international cricket and football. With awareness established, attendances growing and private investment secured, the campaign builds on that momentum by bringing the drama and rivalry of every fixture to life for audiences at home, growing television audiences across BBC and Sky Sports, alongside continued strong attendance, with a particular focus on sporty families and women interested in sport. The campaign is built around the behaviours that make people choose live television: shared viewing, unfolding rivalries, fear of missing out and the excitement of watching events happen in real time. It extends The Hundred’s long-term positioning as an entertainment brand that is cricket - bringing the storytelling language of television to the tension, talking points and shareable moments that are already built into every fixture.
The hero execution is a 30" TVC (with 15” and 6" cut-downs), shot in the style of a reality TV trailer. Players visit “The Hundred Diary Room” to deliver knowing confessional-style soundbites, echoing the conventions of hit reality shows. Each Diary Room moment builds the reality TV language further, teeing up the next burst of action. The film closes on fireworks and explosive match highlights, alongside The Hundred; enduring brand platform: Every. Ball. Counts.
Credits
View on- Agency Elvis/London
- Production Company Armoury
- Director Will Innes Smith
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Credits
View on- Agency Elvis/London
- Production Company Armoury
- Director Will Innes Smith
- Editing tenthree
- Post Production Creative Outpost
- Creative Director Steve Hawthorne
- Creative Indi Morland
- Creative Caitlin Chakraborty
- Executive Producer Laura Melville
- Producer Penny McNally
- Executive Producer Matt Hichens
- Producer Nick Papworth
- Production Manager Lisa Lake
- DP Thomas Hole
- Editor Beth Roberts
- Producer Lottie Allister Crooke
- Executive Producer Caroline McNulty
- Producer Ian Harland
- VFX Artist Tim Davies
- VFX Artist Taylor Vaux-Nobes
- Colorist Jack Caswell
- Sound Design Tom Lane
- Music Luke Isom
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Credits
powered by- Agency Elvis/London
- Production Company Armoury
- Director Will Innes Smith
- Editing tenthree
- Post Production Creative Outpost
- Creative Director Steve Hawthorne
- Creative Indi Morland
- Creative Caitlin Chakraborty
- Executive Producer Laura Melville
- Producer Penny McNally
- Executive Producer Matt Hichens
- Producer Nick Papworth
- Production Manager Lisa Lake
- DP Thomas Hole
- Editor Beth Roberts
- Producer Lottie Allister Crooke
- Executive Producer Caroline McNulty
- Producer Ian Harland
- VFX Artist Tim Davies
- VFX Artist Taylor Vaux-Nobes
- Colorist Jack Caswell
- Sound Design Tom Lane
- Music Luke Isom
The campaign represents the latest evolution of The Hundred’s long-term brand strategy. Each season has adapted its creative expression to support a different stage of the tournament’s growth, while remaining anchored in the belief that The Hundred should behave like a leading entertainment brand rather than simply be marketed like a sports tournament.
"This is about meeting people where they already are - be it at home, or at the game - and bringing them even closer to the action. We've built an incredible tournament with exceptional entertainment, brilliant athletes and genuine rivalries; this campaign is about making sure people know that watching from home is just as much a part of The Hundred experience as being there in person." Cordelia Brown, Marketing Director, ECB.
"After five years of building The Hundred into one of Britain's most exciting new sports properties, the role of marketing has evolved. Rather than only persuading people to come to the ground, we needed to persuade them to choose The Hundred, every single day of the tournament. So we borrowed the storytelling codes of the television shows that already win that battle for attention. Cricket already has the drama. This campaign simply reframes it in a language new audiences instinctively understand." Matt Rhodes, Chief Strategy Officer, ELVIS
The work features leading men's and women's cricketing talent from across The Hundred's eight teams, with voiceover from reality TV favourite Dani Dyer.
Matt Hichens, Managing Director at Armoury, stated: "This project was a challenge we took, safe in the knowledge we had the wonderfully talented Will Innes Smith on board, not only as Live Action Director but also as CGI Point Artist and Creative Director. Now for the bad gags... Will played an absolute blinder and knocked it for 7, in my humble opinion. It was also a pleasure working with everyone at Elvis again: Steve Hawthorn, Indy Moorland, Caitlin Chakraborty, Penny McNally, Laura Melville & Nick Cooper. Also, a huge thank you to everyone at the ECB team, The Hundred. It was a joy working with such good, understanding, and decisive clients.
Last but not least, everyone in the production team at Armoury, thank you for your 100% commitment at all times. Not one ball was dropped! Ouch, sorry."
Innes-Smith shared: "The ambition from the start was simple: make a cricket film that doesn't feel like a cricket film. The Hundred is a collision of heritage and pop culture, a place where old rituals meet new obsessions, so the film had to live in exactly that space. Cricket through a glossy, showbiz filter. Big characters. Bigger drama. Unapologetic spectacle. And underneath it all, one golden rule: Every. Ball. Counts.
The spine of the piece became the grounds themselves, from Headingley to Sophia Gardens, cast not as backdrops but as fully paid-up stars of the show. The opening cuts hard between all eight at a rhythm that really shouldn't work but absolutely does, every frame compositionally locked to the last, a cricket ball stitching the whole thing together. It takes a frankly unreasonable amount of preparation to make something look that effortless, which is rather the point.
And then there's Lord's. You walk through the Grace Gates and two hundred years of the game are suddenly looking over your shoulder: the Pavilion, the Media Centre hovering above it like something that landed overnight and liked the view, Father Time keeping a watchful eye on proceedings. Crews behave differently at Lord's. Quieter. Sharper. It's the closest a film set gets to a cathedral, which made it all the more delicious to roll a red (neon pink) carpet through the middle of it. Where else would the stars of the show make their entrance?
None of it happens without the team. Armoury were the perfect partners, a production company that fought for the ambition of the film rather than quietly trimming it in the night. Our producer Nick Papworth ran the whole circus with the calm of a man who's seen everything and the energy of someone who hasn't. Thomas Hole, our DOP, gave the whole thing its heartbeat: bold, fluid and unmistakably modern, with a painter's eye, a sprinter's decisiveness and the patience of a saint while chasing light on a schedule that showed no mercy. Some of the frames he found at Lord's alone justify the entire endeavour. Charlie Hippisley and the art department were nothing short of brilliant, building worlds as bold and attention-grabbing as The Hundred itself, loaded with the kind of detail most people will never consciously clock but would absolutely feel if it were missing.
A good friend once told me, "remember to enjoy this one," and against a full-on schedule and the great British summer doing its unpredictable thing, I genuinely did. This is not cricket as we know it, and that was always the point. Blink and you'll miss a ground. Watch it twice and you'll want tickets."
