WARREN Brown was sitting at his desk in Sydney in 1993 when he took the phone call that sparked the most memorable advertising campaign in Australian sport’s history.

“We’ve got Carl Lewis,” came the word from Melbourne. “Think of a line for him and we can film him tomorrow morning at 6am.”

Lewis was just the kind of athlete Brown needed. He’d promised the AFL the best sportsmen in the world when, a few weeks earlier, he’d pitched a commercial named “I’d Like To See That”.

The idea was to highlight the spectacular aspects of Australian Rules — the high-flying marks, heavy hits and tireless running — by having foreign heroes marvel at our footballer’s abilities.

But to this point Brown was yet to secure any. Lewis was a Godsend.

The star of the past three Olympic Games, the man born Frederick Carlton Lewis was only in Australia for 26 hours. He’d received a letter from a 17-year-old Aussie fan who, after surviving cancer as a young child, had his own athletics career derailed by a life-threatening heart condition.

The story touched the sprint king so deeply he’d interrupted his training to make a whirlwind trip Down Under to grant the teen’s wish of meeting his idol.

Brown’s Melbourne connections had reached out to the track star and he’d agreed to be the first athlete filmed for the commercial.

They met at the Hilton. Brown didn’t have time to find a director, so he did it himself. The paint on the black and white backdrop he used was still drying as Lewis — bare-chested with a hooped earring dangling from his left lobe — delivered the line: “You’re telling me these guys can run flat out all afternoon? I’d like to see that.”

It was the most crucial step in a journey that would see this Aussie ad man travel the globe meeting some of the most famous athletes in the world and have so many happy to be in his commercials he’d knock back the likes of Hulk Hogan.

SOMETHING MISSING

IT nearly never happened. Brown had only recently returned from a 13-year stint in the UK, where he began his career in advertising, when he heard the AFL was looking for a new commercial.

Brown’s employer, The Campaign Palace, had a connection with the league dating back to 1979 when it teamed with Mike Brady to produce the “Up There Cazaly” commercial. But it wasn’t planning to pitch this time.

“I was the only creative person in the company that had played AFL,” Brown told news.com.au.

“I played at East Doncaster and the last game I played was in under-15s and we won the premiership. I said, ‘This is the AFL, we can’t lose it.’”

Brown had spent more than one or two conversations attempting to convince the Poms of how talented Aussie Rules footballers were during his time overseas.

That perspective helped him write a script, but the night before he was scheduled to pitch the commercial to the AFL, Brown knew it was still missing something.

“I thought, you know what would be a good track for it? ‘Unbelievable’ by EMF,” Brown said. “I was in Melbourne but I had the 12-inch single I’d bought back from London in Sydney. So I had it couriered overnight down to Melbourne and we stuck it on the animatic. It lit the whole thing up.”

BEST OF THE BEST

AFTER locking in Lewis, Brown delivered a shopping list of athletes to a contact of AFL chief Ross Oakley’s in New York.

He was able to sign up reigning heavyweight boxing world champion Evander Holyfield, English Premier League star Ian Wright — who was at the peak of his Arsenal career — and Hakeem Olajuwon, who was in the middle of an NBA season he’d finish as champion and MVP.

These were the best of the best in sport at the time. “Getting Carl Lewis — the world’s top athlete — made all the difference,” Brown said. “The others thought, ‘If Carl’s going to do it, I’ll do it.’”

Brown filmed spots in New York, Houston and London for the first commercial.

There were some intimidating moments with Holyfield and ferocious NFL linebacker Lawrence Taylor — who was in a foul mood after a mix-up with his carpark — and frustration as tennis brat John McEnroe failed to deliver his line “these guys spit the dummy at the umpire and get away with it?” with any real gusto.

“I don’t really get the line,” McEnroe said.

“John, you’re one of the biggest dummy spitters on the planet!” Brown responded. “You have kids don’t you? You know when a kid gets really angry the dummy spits out their mouth and goes flying across the room? That’s a dummy spit.”

But as a rule, all of the athletes were giving with their time and happy to work for a nominal fee.

“The ad looked like it would have cost a fortune but it was actually quite cost-effective,” Brown said. “You can say the first one was certainly under half a million by a big margin. We got a lot of bang for our buck.”

INTO THE VERNACULAR

THE commercial was launched in Sydney in April, 1994, and was an instant hit. Everyone was repeating it, including top level politicians.

“The day after it launched they were interviewing Alexander Downer (who was in the opposition at the time) and he said: ‘Paul Keating a Prime Minister? I’d like to see that,’” Brown said.

“It went straight into the vernacular, literally overnight. I haven’t done anything that’s changed the language that quickly. And then the general public ran with it. ‘I’d like to see that’ was being used everywhere.”

The 1994 AFL Annual Report stated the campaign was seen by more than nine million people in the first month of screening.

“The reaction was terrific,” Oakley told news.com.au. “We were able to kill two birds with one stone. The AFL lovers loved it and it also impacted the unconverted.”

Future editions were just as successful. Newspapers sought to reveal the next lot of stars, nightly bulletins covered the launches like a news event and talk shows ran the entire advertisements in full, without charge.

As a response to the NRL and Tina Turner’s extremely popular “Simply The Best” commercial from earlier in the decade, it was just what the AFL needed.

Attendance at games increased from 4.7 million to just under 6 million in the next few years. The league, previously a Victorian-centric competition with footholds in South and Western Australia, could finally consider itself nationally relevant.

On reflection, Brown knows he wouldn’t get away with making the same commercial today. Highlighting ferocious hits would seem in poor taste given the research done into the long-term impact of concussion in recent years. Ditto with promoting umpire abuse or players as sex symbols.

“Back then people took it as part of the game. These days it would be politically incorrect,” he said. “But overall we just wanted to give people a sense of pride, that our athletes were as good as anyone going around.”

CENTENARY EDITION

THE AFL celebrated its 100th year in 1996 and afforded Brown his largest budget to date to mark the occasion.

Instead of athletes, actor Heather Locklear, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, musician John Lee Hooker and comedian George Burns, filled the roster and left Brown with some of his most indelible memories from the whole experience.

He watched Tutu rugby pass a Sherrin around with his fellow bishops in South Africa, listened to Hooker jam on his guitar after filming finished and managed to avoid Locklear’s spot falling apart after her agent felt the line “clubs full of guys with great bodies? I’d like to see that” wasn’t good for her image.

“We’d built a set in a disused mall (near Locklear’s home in Thousand Oaks, California) because she didn’t want to come down to LA to film,” Brown said.

“She had three agents and on the morning of the shoot one of them told me she wouldn’t do the line.”

Brown knocked on the door of the Winnebago he’d hired for Locklear to use and managed to work his way into her good graces by talking about the red sequined dress she was wearing.

Moments later he walked out of the Winnebago to three expectant agents. “She’ll be on set in 15 minutes,” he said triumphantly.

99-year-old Burns was the star of the commercial but also presented a unique problem. If he died before the commercial was launched his line “a game as old me? I’d like to see that” wouldn’t work.

So with trepidation, Brown asked the Hollywood icon’s agent if Burns would also record a secondary line in case “he is no longer with us”. “Of course he will, he’s a comedian,” was the reply.

It proved a prescient move. Three weeks before the start of the 1996 season, Burns died in his Beverly Hills home after suffering a heart attack. “A game that lasted longer than me?” was inserted into the final cut.

“It was the final joke of one of the greatest of all time,” Oakley said. “He delivered even after he was dead.”

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

Brown left The Campaign Palace to start his own agency in 1996 but the commercials continued to reach new heights, literally.

In 1998 a producer travelled to Russia to film a live feed of cosmonaut Sergei Avdeev on the space station Mir. “Australia launching men into space every few minutes,” Avdeev said. “I’d like to see that.”

The Palace’s director of client service Randal Glennon said it was one of the most ambitious spots in the campaign. “We were able to reach out to the Russians and, even though I don’t think they really knew what was going on, they were happy to help out,” Glennon said.

Shaquille O’Neal (“white men that can’t jump?”), supermodel Christy Turlington (“men who can score every few minutes?”), the fastest man on earth, Donovan Bailey (“so you’re meant to sprint, bouncing a ball like this?”) and even the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote (“guys harder to catch than Road Runner?”) all took their turn.

After its first drop in attendances in five years, the AFL axed the campaign in 1999. Its replacement, the “I was there” commercial which was created in-house, was nowhere near as successful and to this day Glennon believes “I’d like to see that” should still be running.

“It was such a great format. You’re never going to run out of famous athletes so all you needed was to keep the lines fresh,” he said.

The AFL resurrecting the campaign? We’d like to see that.