From getting a corporate box at IND vs AUS Border-Gavaskar Trophy to planning ICC Champions Trophy 2025, meet one of the BTS people working away in the nets to make things happen on the ground

The IAF's Surya Kiran aircrafts perform an aerobatic display over the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad during a rehearsal ahead of the 2023 ICC World Cup final match between India and Australia on November 19, 2023. (Image: AFP)

Among the Indian spectators at the ongoing Border Gavaskar Trophy 2024, is a set whose trip to Australia was sponsored by and planned courtesy Asian Paints. Now, it's not uncommon for big corporates to reward their top dealers with trips abroad and match tickets - everyone from Dalmia Cement to Eicher Motors has been doing it for decades to incentivize dealers to bring them more business. Having said that, such "giveaways" do require a fair bit of planning. For this trip, for instance, it required Australian visas for the dealers and their families, travel arrangements, and stay and meals in-between. The agency that planned these details for the Asian Paints-sponsored Australia trip through November 2024- January 2025 is Mumbai/Delhi-based XP&D. Now, XP&D has also managed events from the other end of this equation: for the International Cricket Council (ICC). In a virtual video interview from Mumbai, XP&D (pronounced expand) co-founder Chanda Singh spoke about planning events and campaigns for the ICC, celebrating 100 episodes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Mann Ki Baat, working with Asian Paints and why she thinks India is ready to host a Coachella level event. Edited excerpts:

You mentioned you're working with ICC currently. Any projects that you're doing with them right now?

Yeah, we're working on the Champions Trophy right now. (The ICC Champions Trophy is scheduled from February 19 - March 9, 2025, across Pakistan and the UAE)

And what does that entail?

We have been given the mandate to handle four leagues in ICC.

We worked with ICC when we were doing the World Cup in 2023. "It takes one day" was the campaign line that helped us win the project. And then we were given the marketing and social mandate for executing various milestones for the World Cup in India. So if you would have seen the trophy reveal, if you would have seen the captains' day, there were various milestone experiential events that we had to do, including the closing ceremony for which we partnered with the Surya Kiran IAF team (the aerobatics demo team of the Indian Air Force) and we did an Indian air show with the air force. Then we had a sound and light show and performances - so that was 2023.

In 2024, we worked with them on Women's T20 that happened in Dubai; it was supposed to happen in Bangladesh, but you know what happened in Bangladesh, so it got shifted to Dubai.

Currently we are working on the Champions Trophy. It's a league again, with all the cricket teams of the world. Various milestone events that ICC has to do in order to announce the league, execute the league and do all their marketing initiatives around the league, is taken care of by us.

Tell us what goes into the planning of an event like this. Perhaps you could walk us through one of these events you planned, like the Mann Ki Baat 100th episode celebration event that you did?

We finished doing that (Mann Ki Baat) when the 100 episodes celebration had to happen. I can tell you about our experience doing these large-scale stadium events, like the WPL opening ceremony. So let me just walk you through what happened with the WPL (Women's Premier League) opening ceremony in 2023, and the same calendar events will happen in 2025 as well. So, it will almost be probably a similar kind of an experience.

When you are planning an event for an outdoor stadium versus an indoor ballroom, obviously the canvas changes and the demand from the particular event is not from 'what the client wants' but 'what the fans would want to see'. When we were doing WPL (2023), we did the inception and we did the entire marketing campaign... we wanted to celebrate the women; we wanted to call them the queens of cricket, which is why we wanted to create a cricket Queendom.

Now think about it; when you're talking about women playing cricket, while obviously Indians love to watch women playing cricket, it's still not anywhere in comparison to where the men's cricket is in terms of viewership and experience in India. So to celebrate the women and celebrate the legends of cricket, we wanted to bring the kings of Bollywood - to celebrate the players, as kind of a tribute to the women or the queens...

We went out to all the top Bollywood stars ranging from Varun Dhawan to Tiger Shroff to Shahid Kapoor... to try and understand that if there are five teams that are playing in WPL, we should have a tribute from these Bollywood superstars to the teams. But to encapsulate the entire thing and take it up a notch, we went to the king of Bollywood. You know who I'm talking about; we went to Mr Shah Rukh Khan and we spoke to him and we made him understand the importance of celebrating cricket with women here and he very gracefully accepted the entire offer, and he came and paid the final tribute. He involved himself in the entire planning, did something with all the five captains on stage…

You mentioned that post-pandemic people want to be on the ground, they want to be meeting other people and experiencing different events. Some of the concerts and events in India lately have seen some mismanagement all-around. What is your take on this - are we falling behind on some of the very basic things in terms of event management in India?

Honestly, we have come out of a time where these things couldn't be managed at all. And while I know that we are still getting there, I think we have reached a fair bit of a ground where we can host these international concerts or national concerts in India. Yes, there will be teething problems depending on the city that you are doing it at. But having done one myself, which is BMW Joyfest (2024) where we had Diljit Dosanjh with us, I think we have come a long way to be able to now really stand in front of the others and say that yes, we can manage it. I have been to overseas concerts as well, and trust you me things are not very hunky-dory there either. So yes, we are learning our ways, and we are trying to figure out from our past experiences to make sure that the next experience is smoother, but having said that, I think we have managed to reach a fair place right now.

So could we have a Coachella-like event in India?

Why not? We're absolutely ready in terms of venues, in terms of management, in terms of experiences that we can give to the fans. I think we're absolutely ready.

You manage corporate events, including dealer events for Asian Paints. Is that right?

For the longest time... 22 years... I started off in 2003 with my previous agency which was Encompass, it was part of WPP. In 2016, I moved out of Encompass and in 2019 we started XP&D. Having said that, we didn't start as a startup. With our clients moving out with us, all our people moving out with us.

The India country head of Australia Tourism mentioned in a previous conversation with Moneycontrol that Asian Paints had booked an entire box for the Border Gavaskar Trophy 2025. Was that done by you?

You can imagine how challenging it would be for us to take the same set of dealers every year to a different country and give them new sets of experiences, and even more so, challenging for us to go back to the same client - for example, Asian Paints - year-on-year, month-on-month, to give them ideas on how we can engage with the dealers in a very different manner. Because the community is only that much, because these dealers' communities have grown from fathers to sons to maybe sons-in-law; they all talk amongst each other... The fact that creating something new for them every time, we do this for them is a challenging thing for us.

But yes, speaking of the Australian trip, we took the top brass of Asian Paints to Australia (in 2024) and... we booked an entire cruise. And then (while cruising) we had people coming out of the waters and doing all kinds of acrobatics, aerial acts in the water, with the water… there was an LED show. And then obviously we had to do something crazy that nobody has done; we did a firework show right in front of the Sydney Opera House...

Tell us about your work on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Mann Ki Baat.

We did the Mann Ki Baat when it happened for the first time in Delhi and in Bombay (Mumbai). When we did it in front of Gateway of India and India Gate. That was just the start of Mann Ki Baat. And then we did the 100th episode celebration of Mann Ki Baat wherein we actually did the projection mapping across all the sites in India and talked about Mann ki Baat. So that was an experiential event for celebration of the 100th episode of Mann Ki Baat.

How many people do you have in the XP&D office right now?

Mumbai-Delhi put together I think we have about 180-odd people.