The Hundred Draft

Established by the English Cricket Board in 2021, The Hundred is an innovative new cricket tournament designed to attract new fans to the sport. The competition itself takes place every summer and is preceded by an exciting Draft event in March where each of the 8 men’s and womens’ teams make their final team selections. In 2024, the ECB decided to take control of the production and broadcast of the Draft and appointed the production company Little Dot along with Dizplai to make the live Draft bigger and better than ever.

Challenge

When the ECB came to Dizplai to provide graphics for the draft, they set some key creative goals for the digital-first broadcast:

Big, bold and on-brand: the graphics should be clear, easy to read on any device and reflective of the colour and energy of The Hundred brand.

Dynamic: in keeping with the platforms and their audiences, the graphics should be as dynamic and informative as possible, constantly keeping the audience engaged and allowing them to dip in and out of the 2-hour show.

Interactive and inclusive: the entire event should feel as interactive and inclusive as possible – reflecting genuine fan engagement, opinion and excitement.

Commercial:  as well as integrating commercial partner branding, the graphics should provide ample opportunity to promote tickets for the competition.

Added to the above was the need to communicate a relatively complex picking process with hundreds of potential player-team combinations  “pick alerts’, “team snapshots” and “full squad overview” graphics. These and all the other graphics needed to be operated easily and quickly by the production team in real time.

The entire graphics project had to be delivered in less than 3 weeks.

Solution

In collaboration with the ECB and The Hundred brand team, we co-designed a set of striking, dynamic graphics to convey both the Draft as it happened as well as audience comments and questions from YouTube live chat and X and photos from Instagram and X.

The graphics wove together the Hundred branding, team logos and colours as well as the branding of primary sponsor Sage – as well as calls-to-action for tickets for the fixtures of the competition itself.

We then implemented a custom workflow on the Dizplai platform to make it as easy as possible for the production team to match selected players to their teams, trigger pick alerts and update team lists as efficiently as possible.

Outcome

The Draft livestream was watched by over 100,000 cricket fans worldwide across the Hundred, ECB and Sky Sports Cricket YouTube channels. As well as passively watching, viewers submitted comments on the Draft as it happened, questions for guest cricketers and photos – from YouTube chat, X and Instagram.

To watch The Hundred Draft livestream on YouTube click here!