The Big Interview – Des Johnson

Sven-Goran Eriksson recently unveiled Castrol’s Ultimate Performing Player, a waxwork model consisting features of some of the world’s greatest footballers. Des Johnson, Castrol Global Brand Manager, spoke exclusively to Sportindustry.biz about the model and Castrol’s World Cup activity.

What was the reasoning behind creating the Castrol Edge Ultimate Performing Player?

Very simple, we took the idea that every football fan talks about in the pub – ‘if you could take the best bits from every football player in the world, what player would you end up with?’.

So we applied a bit of good quality analysis and used some technology to bring this to life and that took us towards creating the Castrol Edge Ultimate Performing Player.

From a proposition point of view what Castrol Edge can bring to sports is; we have an ethos as a brand which is applying technology to analysis, so we take that philosophy and apply it to football. So we feel that we can give a fantastic input into football.

Why did you choose Sven-Goran Eriksson to launch it?

We felt that he had an interesting perspective on the piece, he has a huge global presence and he is a Castrol Edge ambassador as well as a national coach who is going to be at the World Cup with Ivory Coast.

What criteria did the players have to have to be included in the model?

We started off by talking to Castrol performance analysts such as Arsene Wenger and Alan Shearer and then taking the opinion of our expert statisticians and set them the challenge of creating the Ultimate Performing Player.

They came out with 10 particular attributes, some physical such as height – obviously Peter Crouch came out on top of this one, why? Well because he has won 100 more aerial balls than any other striker.

Some attributes were more mental, for example when Carles Puyol was captaining Barcelona this season, he led his team to 81% of the games he played in.

Then we looked at skill based attributes, so we looked at Xavi of Barcelona, because we wanted to pick out those players with vision that created more chances and Xavi created 209 chances across the course of the season.

Could you explain the Castrol Rankings system and how it will operate during the World Cup?

The Castrol rankings operates across the top 5 European club leagues and analyses top players performances from these leagues. We look at the clubs as the frequency of data is more interesting than few and far between international matches.

We would like to include the South American leagues as well at one stage.

So what we do is we evaluate every player’s performance in every match then they get a points score for that match. Bigger matches are weighted at more than lower matches so more points can be scored.

The rankings list is then based upon a rolling average of players’ performance for their clubs.

The rankings showed that Thierry Henry was top of the rankings at the start of last season which may surprise some people but he justified his position at the top of the list because he was great throughout the whole year, contributing a lot to Barcelona’s victories.

At the World Cup – we will look at the Castrol index scores at the end of the tournament and then we will produce a league table to show who the best players were.

We did it at the Confederations Cup and the USA’s Clint Dempsey was second because he had a great tournament and Brazil’s centre-back Lucio was first because he won so many tackles.

As an official World Cup sponsor can you talk through your marketing ideas ahead of the World Cup?

There are a number of things that are running already, we stress that this is very much a global property and we have activity running our World Cup campaign in 40 countries worldwide.

We are using our sponsorship of the World Cup in a variety of ways, in Vietnam our main brand is motorcycling so we use our association with Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo and the advert we did with him that also links to promos and competitions and during the tournament we will create events in that country.

In Costa Rica – we are doing a tour using the World Cup mascot ‘Zakumi’ – we have a 6 foot suit Castrol Zakumi in local dealerships so we are using the sponsorship right across our product range.

We have also used the promotion within the B2B environment, so we have used this as a tool to build relations.

In England we are running a major promotion called ‘Greatest Moments’ that gives consumers the chance to meet Ronaldo and watch him play in Madrid if they can match his choice of the top 10 WC moments.

Castrol has gone down the promotional route of using ambassadors, why?

We firmly believe that ambassadors complement our rights with FIFA.

We use ambassadors as they can be a great embodiment of our brand, for example, take the Ronaldo association with Castrol edge and Castrol Power One – both are about performance under pressure.

The fact that the oil will help an engine run smoother matches with the way Ronaldo plays football and his physical attributes – drawing an analogy with that to bike oil.

Ambassadors are also good from a consumer’s point of view, as we can put on business events, and then bring Alan Shearer in to talk to business partners, so it also improves B2B relations.

They also obviously offer great PR value, and they can offer real authority on some of our business models such as the Castrol Rankings System that uses Marcel Desailly and Arsene Wenger.

Finally, how far do you think that England will go at this summer’s World Cup?

I’ve been following England for too many years, a glorious defeat at the Quarter Final stage I think, probably on penalties.

Watch Sven-Goran Eriksson unveil the Ultimate Player here in Sport Industry TV.