The Winter Olympics campaign on BBC radio

Hello from Abuja where, yesterday, I was trying to explain the Winter Olympics to a Nigerian colleague.

Nigeria doesn’t have snow and the country has never entered a team in the Winter Olympics. I could see my colleague struggling to understand why all the excitement… “are there really so many ways to slide down a mountain?”

What a shame I didn’t have Neil Cowling’s audio to hand. It brings the excitement of winter sport right up close as a battle against nature:

[audio:http://earshotcreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/bbc-olympics-launch.mp3|titles=”BBC Winter Olympics launch – RKCR Y&R / Neil Cowling”]

Neil’s carved a niche for himself as the go-to guy for radio sports trails that have to extend out of tv-led campaigns.

It’s a producer’s dream to work with actors like Charles Dance and to the creative direction of agencies like RKCR Y&R but Neil’s also the kind of producer who will gladly sit down with Gigabytes of uncategorised audio and painstaking find the golden output clips that will make his mixes memorable.

It’s one reason I hired Neil for projects when I established the team now called BBC Cross Trails and the BBC Winter Olympics radio trails are classic Cowling.

The campaign is running across all BBC radio in the UK and Neil has produced different versions that fit the sound and tone of each network. Here’s today’s daily trail made for BBC Radio 5 Live (complete with sophisticated snow graphics):

Neil Cowling runs Fresh Air Production, produced this campaign for BBC Cross Trails and you can hear more of his work in this edition of the Earshot Creative Review podcast from 2012.