Toast Manages Legendary Football Player Thierry Henry’s Visit to India for PUMA

by  EVENTFAQS Bureau Marketing | November 29, 2016 | News

Puma Toast Events

Football legend and world-cup winner Thierry Henry recently visited Mumbai for the very first time as part of global sportswear brand PUMA’s initiative. By bringing down Arsenal’s invincible Thierry Henry to India for the first time, PUMA aimed to provide a statuesque experience to all football lovers and Toast Events was appointed as the agency to manage the event. DOME at NSCI SVP Stadium in Worli, was chosen as the fitting venue given the event format.

Thierry Henry, Arsenal’s record goal scorer, visiting Mumbai was a dream come true, especially for his die-hard fans in the country who had been waiting enthusiastically for his arrival and to a get a glimpse of the legend. PUMA had roped in Toast to plan the event, the entire production, content and logistics.

Toast did a tremendous amount of research on all promotional events attended by the footballer and realized that at events across the world, Thierry Henry plays football in some form or the other. Here the agency wanted to use him differently. Hence, Toast conceptualised this idea on how he could play coach and came up with the idea of creating a 5-A-Side game which involved celebrities and kids.

The idea was simple yet innovative, on one side (Team Faster), which had celebrities like ISL players Dhanachandra Singh, Shankar Sampingiraj, Cricketer Aditya Tare, Bollywood celebrities Harshvardhan Kapoor and Dino Morea. On the other side, there were kids from Arsenal Soccer School and Reliance Foundation Young Champs who were coached by Thierry Henry himself.

At the venue, history walls were created to give people a peak into the achievements of Henry with actual memorabilia being showcased as people entered. Additionally, ginormous branding panels with visuals, hashtags and branding laid out in a curvature made for a grand backdrop setting for the whole event.

The event was broken down into capsules, where Thierry first trained and interacted with grass-root level players from Arsenal Soccer School and Reliance Foundation Young Champs at the event. This was then followed by a 5-A-Side football match against Team TH and Team Faster.

“We wanted to take experiential marketing to the next level. Our aim was to put fans at the heart of the event and plan the content strategy around it. Not only did we want Thierry Henry’s supporters to get a chance to see him in action, but we wanted to do it in a very different way,” says Michelle Sanghvi, Head - Client Servicing, Toast Events.

She further added, “The sheer magnitude of bringing Thierry Henry down was overwhelming. Production elements were colossal because of the pedigree of Henry and scale of the location. Planning was key and PUMA being a perfectionist everything had to be implemented perfectly in a very short time.”

Challenges

Excitement for the event began a week prior when the first announcement was made on PUMA’s social media channels about the living legend. Mumbai fans were ecstatic to hear that they would get a chance to see the man himself in person. The free for all event was a mammoth challenge at hand because the agency knew that fans would pour in the thousands.

Speaking about it, Nilesh Gurav- Director, Toast Events, says, “We had a nightmare to get the whole stadium ready in time. Anticipating the response of fans, and knowing that Thierry Henry was a legend and it was a free event, we left no stone unturned to make the whole event seamless from the time people walked in to the time they left. Keeping the fans happy and comfortable was our focus.”  

Security was another big concern for the agency and a lot of planning had to go into that aspect. Thus, Toast had deployed an army security and promoters throughout the venue to ensure that there were no security breaches, the right flow of crowd and no untoward incidents.

Overall, the event was a massive success as people braved the weekday and Mumbai heat to make it in huge numbers. Over 3000 people attended this fanfare. No untoward incident was reported either inside the venue or outside. The show went on smoothly and most importantly Thierry Henry was delighted to get such a phenomenal response from an Indian crowd. His happiness was reflected as he kicked autographed balls all over the stadium to his supporting fans.