Smashing padel: Inside Aurora's innovative production of the inaugural Hexagon Cup By Heather McLean Thursday, March 14, 2024 - 16:30
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The inaugural Hexagon Cup host broadcast was conceived and developed by Aurora Media Worldwide
The Hexagon Cup, a groundbreaking new mixed-gender padel tournament based on team-accumulated points, witnessed a convergence of elevated technology, strategic storytelling, and creative vision in cameras, audio and graphics.
Led by host broadcaster Aurora, the Hexagon Cup set a new standard for padel coverage, showcasing the sport in a fresh and engaging light. Aurora actually carried out two first' broadcasts of two brand-new competitions back to back. First, the Hexagon Cup took place from 31 January to 4 February, with the Union Internationale Motonautique (UIM) E1 World Electric Powerboat Series taking place in Jeddah from 2 to 3 February 2024.
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The journey of the Hexagon Cup began with a vision to take padel broadcasting to the next level. Aurora's founder and CEO, Lawrence Duffy, traced the project's roots to a conversation with Enrique Buenaventura, one of the founding members of Formula E, which took place around one year ago.
Duffy says: Some of the shareholders of Hexagon are some of the same shareholders that were involved in the launch of Formula E. I was approached by Enrique Buenaventura, who's the chief legal officer of Formula E, about a year ago at a Formula E event; he was a padel player, a very, very good padel player in Spain, and he wanted to create a marquee padel event in Madrid. He thought he could get the best players in the world to participate for the largest prize money that had been offered in padel to date.
He was on the way to doing that and he approached me and said, Lawrence, we want to try and make the television different, and we'd like you to have a think about doing it, so we started to develop the project around the fourth quarter of last year.
Duffy comments on the two innovative broadcasts: The commonality [between E1 and the Hexagon Cup] is that we were asked to bring some innovation to this project, if we could. It was a shorter lead time [than for E1] but again, this tech stack of standard cameras, then special cameras and graphics, then data, was the same sort of approach to try and bring these elements to the output; to bring a level of distinction, a distinct signature, the same as with E1.
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We hope that people watch E1 and say, oh, right, I know what that is, that's E1, because you just have to look at it to see it's distinct from anything else on TV. We wanted to do the same with Hexagon; create a signature broadcast, which was in keeping with the brand position that Hexagon had.
Aurora created a signature style for the Hexagon Cup broadcast, which went out from 31 January to 4 February 2024
Delving into the research
Inspired by Buenaventura's vision to transform padel coverage, Aurora embarked on a journey to create a signature broadcast that would captivate audiences worldwide.
First came the research. We spent a lot of time looking at padel coverage, says Duffy. We did a couple of trips to existing padel events, one in Sweden, one in Italy. Padel coverage is good, and we are very respectful of that. We also thought there was maybe a few things we could ask some of our partners to bring to it that might add some value in terms of production. And then we set about doing that.
The difference between this padel competition and others already on the market is the team element. Traditional padel is formulated very much like tennis, with singles and doubles competition. However, the Hexagon Cup has a male pair, a female pair, and a next gen pair who for 2024 were men under the age of 22 - with the gender of the next gen pair alternating each year with all six in one team contributing to their overall points to win the Hexagon Cup. Altogether six teams compete in the Cup, with each team owned by celebrities, including tennis stars Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal's academy, football player Robert Lewandowski, and Hollywood actress Eva Longoria.
Comments Tom Crump, Aurora's director of development: Not only are we trying to tell the story of those individual tournaments male, female and next gen but also the wider Hexagon Cup output including the coaches and celebrity owners. As Lawrence said, we looked at existing padel tournaments that happened around the world and thought, how can we take this to the next level? Because we know that's what the client was after.
As part of that elevation of this new product Aurora decided to bring something new and different to its output with cameras, audio and graphics.
Aurora Media Worldwide's broadcast team on the ground in Madrid, Spain
Here comes cameras and sound
Crump continues: Padel is popular. It's one of the fastest growing sports out there so there's already a built-in audience. But how could Hexagon Cup expand on that audience, and how could they tell the story differently? They wanted to separate themselves through broadcast from existing products.
We looked at the existing camera plans of other tournaments and thought, how can we elevate this? How can we bring a unique broadcast signature to this? So having a four-point wirecam was something that was really important for us. We were at a venue that was quite tricky for that but Mediapro supplied it for us; it was an important point of difference for the coverage.
We brought some enhanced audio as well, continues Crump. For the fir
