Iconic Ads: Boost – The Secret of My Energy

In 85, the chocolate beverage brand, Boost needed a boost. HMM (Smith Kline Beecham in its earlier avatar) decided to focus on the chocolate malt powder. Boost was an also-ran, with some sales in a few states. Bournvita was streets ahead.

HTA presented multiple creatives to the marketing head, Jishnu Mishra, who thrashed all of them. And they were stuck!

However, it was Jishnu, who gave HTA their insight. He was showing commercials made by SKB in the UK for their brands there. One of them was for Lucozade, featuring Daley Thompson, the champion decathlete. It showed Thompson running in slow motion, using up energy, and then replenishing it with Lucozade. This had turned around the fortunes for Lucozade in the UK.

Jishnu’s single word brief was Energy. He asked HTA to get the kids excited, and most importantly, get Kapil Dev, who had reached cult status thanks to the ’83 World Cup win and other cricketing exploits.

Kapil was holidaying in Texas, they convinced him of the idea

Sumantra Ghosal shot the film and is released it – all in 3 weeks!
The famous line – “Boost is the Secret of My Energy.”

This film was a game-changer. It leveraged a celebrity appropriately and threw to the winds conventional thinking that there has to be a mother; a smart, successful kid plus some analogy/mnemonic for energy.

The line was used for Boost using other famous cricketers for over 3 decades.