Let Them Play: How a Sports Commentator Voice Turned a Number Plate Ad Into a Game Your Brain Wants to Win

One of the unexpected gifts of being a family navigating the rollercoaster of ADHD, ASD and a myriad of therapies is what we’ve learned about the human brain, its various parts and their functions. And how important it is to stop, seek to understand what others are going through, learn why, and adapt our approach. This applies to advertising as much as to a toddler meltdown!

Every one of us is different in what sets us off: the ups, the downs, the fight, flight or freeze. But underneath, our brains all run on the same basic wiring. When we feel safe, we can think, imagine and play. When we feel threatened, the thinking (cognitive) brain steps back, and the defences of the limbic system, cerebellum and brainstem begin to step up.

That’s why this ad works.

A mum is driving her daughter to netball. Nothing unusual about that. Then the commentary kicks in: a big, breathless, grand-final sports call, and suddenly an ordinary school-run is the most important match of the season. The audience isn’t being told about personalised number plates. They’re being invited into a game.

That spot was made for myPlates, the home of personalised number plates in New South Wales, by the clever folk at Custom Creative ^[11], led by Creative Director Steve Schenko. myPlates’ own brief for its campaign platform was a single word: smile ^[11]. I had the joy of providing the sports commentator voice.

Here’s why I think that brief, and that playful frame, is far smarter than it first looks. It comes down to how the brain decides, and how an audience decodes what we send it.

Two brains, one decision

Neuroscientists don’t really split us into an “emotional brain” and a “thinking brain”, but the shorthand is useful. The limbic system, including the amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus, is the fast, feeling, threat-detecting part. The prefrontal cortex, the cognitive brain behind the forehead, is the slow, deliberate planner and critic.

Under stress, the amygdala floods the system with noradrenaline and dopamine. Research shows this switches the prefrontal cortex’s careful control down and the amygdala’s reflexive responses up: behaviour shifts from considered to defensive (Arnsten, 2009) ^[2]. In people living with anxiety or trauma, the pattern can become entrenched, with an over-reactive amygdala and an under-active medial prefrontal cortex that struggles to calm it (Shin and Liberzon, 2010) ^[3].

In advertising terms, that defensive state is the one we’re usually talking into. “Is this a sales pitch? Can I afford it? What will people think?” Those fears, rational or not, are blockers. And they sit between your message and the part of the brain that actually wants things.

Flow and play: turning the critic down

There’s another state the brain can be in. Athletes call it being “in the zone”. Psychologists call it flow: complete absorption in something that matches our skills. Arne Dietrich proposed that flow involves transient hypofrontality, a temporary easing of the prefrontal cortex’s explicit, analytical control so that faster, implicit processing can take over (Dietrich, 2004) ^[4].

Brain-imaging studies back this up. When people were placed in experimentally induced flow, activity dropped in the medial prefrontal cortex, which handles self-referential thinking, and in the amygdala, the fear centre (Ulrich et al., 2014) ^[5]. A follow-up study confirmed the same pattern (Ulrich, Keller and Grön, 2016) ^[6]. Gently reducing prefrontal monitoring with brain stimulation even increased how much flow people reported while gaming (Gold and Ciorciari, 2019) ^[7].

Play sits right next door. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified PLAY as one of seven primary emotional systems hard-wired into mammalian brains, alongside SEEKING, CARE and FEAR, and noted that play and care “cement social-support networks and friendships” (Panksepp, 2011) ^[8]. And Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory shows that positive emotions literally widen what we’re willing to think and try (Fredrickson, 2001) ^[9].

Put simply: when we’re playing, the inner critic quietens, fear (rational, irrational or even trauma-shaped) loosens its grip, and decisions become less inhibited. People get to test a product with their passions, not their defences.

What Bruce Perry’s work with children teaches advertisers

Child psychiatrist Dr Bruce Perry has spent more than three decades helping children who have lived through trauma and neglect. His Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics rests on one simple idea: the brain develops and works from the bottom up. First comes the brainstem (heartbeat, breathing, arousal), then the diencephalon and limbic system (emotion, reward, attachment), then the cortex (language and abstract thought). The higher parts can only do their best work when the lower parts are calm and well regulated (Perry, 2009) ^[14].

Perry also showed that the part of the brain we can use changes moment by moment with our state. As a person moves from calm to alert, alarm, fear and terror, control shifts downwards, from the cortex to the limbic system, midbrain and brainstem. Thinking slides from abstract to concrete, then emotional, reactive and finally reflexive, and our sense of time shrinks from the future to the next few seconds (Perry, 2006) ^[13]. In children who are exposed to threat again and again, those passing states can harden into lasting traits (Perry et al., 1995) ^[12].

Regulate, relate, reason

Perry’s practical answer for children is a sequence, often summarised as regulate, relate, reason. First help the child feel calm and safe in their body, often through patterned, repetitive, rhythmic activity such as music, movement, drumming or walking. Then connect through a trusted, attuned relationship. Only then ask them to think, reflect and learn (Perry, 2009; Perry and Winfrey, 2021) ^[14][15]. Try to reason with a child who is dysregulated and you’ll get nowhere, because the part of the brain you’re talking to is offline.

Flow research reaches the same place from the other direction. Flow shows up when the fear centre quietens and the inner critic eases off (Ulrich et al., 2014) ^[5], and it comes most easily in rhythmic, absorbing activity with a clear goal. In other words, a game. Perry’s model explains why you can’t reach the playful, imaginative cortex of an audience you’ve just tipped into alarm.

A respectful note: Perry’s work is clinical, built to help children heal from real trauma. Viewers aren’t patients and an ad isn’t therapy. But the brain he describes is the same brain that watches ads, and his lesson carries: regulate before you reason.

For advertisers, the lesson is about order. Plenty of ads lead with the reason (a price, a feature list, a problem to be scared of) to an audience nobody has regulated or related to yet. Lead with rhythm and safety, earn the relationship, and only then make the ask.

The ChildTrauma Academy points to one more trap: the power gap. When a bigger, louder adult pushes a child, the child slides along the stress scale from alarm towards fear, and either fights back, runs, or shuts down. When the adult gets smaller, softer and steadier, while staying clear about the point, the child is far more likely to come back to calm ^[16]. A hard-sell ad is the shouting adult. An invitation to play is the adult kneeling down to talk.

What the sports commentator does to the brain

That’s exactly the job the commentary does in the myPlates spot. A sports call is a cue every Aussie recognises: it says game on. The car becomes the court, the parent and child become the players, and the plate becomes part of who they are and what they love. Nobody is asked to weigh up a purchase. They’re invited to cheer for a moment from their own lives.

As the voice, my job is to make that invitation irresistible: high energy, perfect timing, and a wink that says “we both know this is ridiculous, and isn’t it fun?” That’s Performance Beyond the Words: the delivery moves the listener into a state of play before they’ve consciously decided anything.

Stuart Hall: why the right audience reads it right

In 1973, cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued that communication isn’t a pipe that delivers meaning intact. Producers encode a message using signs shaped by their own frameworks of knowledge, and audiences decode it through theirs (Hall, 1973, explained in Media Studies, n.d.) ^[1]. Meaning only lands as intended when those frameworks overlap.

Hall described three ways an audience can read a message: the dominant (or preferred) reading, which accepts the meaning the producer intended; the negotiated reading, which accepts some of it; and the oppositional reading, which rejects it ^[1].

Here’s where targeting and play work together. If you choose your audience well and speak their language (here, Australian families who live and breathe weekend sport), you maximise the overlap between the encoder’s and decoder’s frameworks. Those viewers are the most likely to produce the dominant reading, because the signs belong to their world.

Then the play state does the rest. With the critic quietened, the people most likely to decode the message as intended are also the least likely to block it. They don’t just understand the ad. They feel it, recognise themselves in it, and imagine the product as theirs.

Does emotion actually sell?

The effectiveness data says yes. Les Binet and Peter Field’s landmark analysis of the IPA Databank found that emotional campaigns outperform rational ones on both brand and business measures, and over the longer term are almost twice as likely to produce top-box profit growth (Binet and Field, 2013) ^[10]. Play is one of the most reliable emotional doors there is.

Back where it started: home

This piece started at our kitchen table. Living with ADHD and autism under one roof has taught us that behind every meltdown, shutdown or flat-out “no” is a brain doing exactly what it was built to do: protect someone. When we stop asking “what’s wrong with you?” and start asking “what’s happening for you?”, everything changes.

It turns out that’s the same question at the heart of my work. Every brief is a chance to meet an audience where they are: to calm the room, make a real connection, and earn the right to be heard. A voice can raise the temperature or lower it. I’d much rather lower it, and invite people to play.

After more than thirty years behind the mic, that’s what still fascinates me. The same science that helps a child feel safe enough to learn helps an audience feel safe enough to listen, and helps all of us bring out the best in one another. My clients, my craft and the people I love keep teaching me the same lesson.

So here’s my hope for every spot I voice, and every day at home: a little more understanding, a little more play, and a lot more kindness. Let them play. Let’s all play.

Colin