At the core of their strategy to pull off what will be one of the great commercial revolutions of the modern age is a content plan that they hope will sell the All Blacks to the world as authentic and relatable, turn their players into household names around the world, win millions of new fans and send the value of their content rights soaring.
And at the heart of this content plan lies this notion that by producing big-budget, high-drama, never-seen-before, can’t-miss series such as In Their Own Words, viewers will be taken into the inner sanctum of the All Blacks, where secrets will be revealed to produce an undeniably authentic representation of life inside the world’s best-known rugby team.
NZR is estimated to have spent about $10m on content creation in the last year, so with that sort of investment, these projects need to deliver returns – something the second series of In Their Own Words seems highly unlikely to do.
The latest instalment follows the All Blacks through their build-up to the World Cup last year and then at the tournament itself. It comes with the high production values, access to exclusive footage and the down-the-barrel, one-person interviews that have proven such a successful formula for other sports such as tennis, golf and motor racing’s Formula One that have embraced this genre of content.
But what In Their Own Words doesn’t have is any drama – not the authentic kind where players and coaches delve into the real issues that they faced, speak with no inhibition and produce a series that is genuinely compelling because it reveals storylines to the audience about which they had no idea.
Instead, it glosses over the truly sticky things like the coaching team finding out six months before the tournament that they wouldn’t be retained after it.
A scandal like this would be forensically addressed by Drive to Survive – the standard-bearer for sports shows of this genre – but NZR seemingly doesn’t have the appetite to air its dirty laundry on camera. And that is a sign it doesn’t fully understand what it has got itself into by wanting to commercialise content and rebrand the All Blacks.
The series also managed to sell two other potentially captivating storylines as bland, predictable and forgettable.
Sam Cane revealed he was disappointed and shocked by the red card he was shown in the final, which was hardly a revelation or something that viewers couldn’t have worked out for themselves.
What needed to happen for the investment in this project to be worthwhile was for Cane to question why it was that after a pre-tournament agreement was reached to keep TMO interference to a minimum in the knockout games, the final was basically refereed from the video bunker at Roland Garros.
He also might want to have said something about why he was red-carded but South African captain Siya Kolisi was yellow-carded, when the respective incidents that led to them being in trouble looked indistinguishable to the millions watching.
Might he even have ventured to suggest on camera whether World Rugby has become too enamoured with the role the Springboks are playing in unifying and inspiring South Africa, and that there may have been some trepidation about sending off Kolisi, given his talismanic standing in a country that often feels short of hope?
Potentially this would have made Cane sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it probably also would have been a closer representation to how he really felt sitting on the chair at the side of the field being told his yellow card was being upgraded to red.
And a trick was missed in not revealing how the team really felt about Ireland’s Johnny Sexton and Peter O’Mahony ahead of their quarter-final clash.
Again, the truth is that Sexton had berated referees throughout the 2022 series against New Zealand (and for much longer), while O’Mahony had bad-mouthed everyone and anyone, to the point where most likely every All Black would gladly have smacked them one.
The All Blacks wanted to get after those two in the quarter-final, which is why Brodie Retallick has confirmed that he did indeed call O’Mahony a f***wit when he shook his hand after the game.
Going hard into the backstories of the grudge against Sexton and O’Mahony would have produced untold drama, but viewers only get hints and passing references.
NZR, it would appear, doesn’t understand the nature of the content game NZR it is playing – and seems not to realise that if it wants an audience, and in time commercial returns, it has to be brave enough to fully unshackle the players and let them tell their full truth.
There’s no point in spending millions to not tell the story the audience wants, and so the second series of In Their Own Words is likely to prove to be the latest flop in a flawed $10m content strategy.
