A man that needs no introduction. Mr. George Kern, how are you, sir?
So, George, it is our 20th anniversary and as part of our celebrations, I'm putting together a list of the 25 greatest leaders in the new millennium. And today, you see watches entrenched in popular culture more than ever. And I wrote in my article, you can go back 20 years ago and thank George Kern for this because he started that all. Tell me about the inspiration for that.
So, it's perfectly right. 20 years ago the watch industry communicated like in a silo. We were talking about the designs, we were talking about movements, but it became a cultural phenomenon. If you look at the last 20, 30 years, it became totally horizontal. Somebody who likes a watch goes to the cinema, goes to a sitter, is interested in art, goes to Art Basel or whatever. And at that time, of course, I must admit I'm passionate about cinema. I thought yes, let's get into this. And you remember these movies with Steve McQueen, I used to work with Stack for Tyer and he, Paul Newman, all of that started that time but by chance, and we started to do it as a tool and we were the first ones to do this at the time at IWC.
But you did it brilliantly. And I remember watching this Jason Bourne movie, right? And in it, this is one of the offshoots of Jeremy Renner, who I love incidentally. I think he's an amazing actor. A whole sequence where he's timing his movements when he's facing these assassins. And I remember asking you about that. You said, 'Wayey, there's going to be guys that through the normal channels I'm never going to be able to reach.' Right? But that guy on the weekend is going to take his very expensive pickup truck and go with his family and watch a movie and see Jeremy Renner kicking ass and see this watch and say I like that. I'm interested in that and that is a way I can contact so much of a bigger audience. How did you get it entrenched in such a meaningful way in movies like that?
Well, obviously we were talking and we're still talking to production companies. And at that time we tried to rationalize it. I just wanted to mention that the first James Bond watch developed by Q in Thunderball was a Breitling because we talked about Tag Heuer, let's talk about Breitling. So the first one was Top Time in Thunderball worn by Sean Connery. So at that time we started to talk to production companies. We had first straf of refusals and it became systematic and now everybody's doing it in series because series today are bigger than movies and you see it and it's as I said part of a culture.
I mean, these were different times. First of all, at that time, we had much less social media. We had an incredible red carpet. We had all the prints. We had all the TV stations. I think this was probably the SIH events were probably part of the biggest events on the planet. I mean we had kids lunch at we had all the incredible stars. The first event was with all on the bloom. We had fights on the red carpet. Who should walk through it the first one the last one. It was crazy. But I don't think these kind of events are adequate in our times today. because of the wars, because of all the cries, you have to do different stuff. We do it for instance in Beritz, we do surfing, we do it's not about red carpet, it's more going into the mud with your motorbike. It's a different experience because times change. It was crazy at that time. A lot of fun. We did this Formula 1 where we with all these celebrities we changed the wheels. you remember with Zidan with Jean Reo with all these with stars was phenomenal and the press got crazy and we had people at that time offering money $1,000 5,000 $10,000 just to be invited.
Oh, there was so many people trying to sneak into this party. It was incredible.
Incredible. A lot of fun. Oh my god. You make me look old now. And yeah.
No, but it was cool because you were saying this is before the social media era. So how do you get like the top global press, generalist press to cover a watch event? It's through this and this is a brilliant idea. Okay. So let's go from that to something that you just did just recently and that is to do an association with it's not just a sports organization. It's not just a league. It is representative of the entire fabric of America and that is the NFL.
Correct. I knew that the NFL was very powerful, much more powerful and more public like than the NBA or the NHL. It's phenomenal. We had give you an example. We had the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, you know, where they just made the series on Netflix, which is number one. It's a killer on Netflix. And I watched it and they came. They have millions of followers now. The NFL is a cultural phenomenon. There's nothing more American than the NFL. And you have over 100 million viewers at the Super Bowl final. And it's totally different from soccer here in Europe. It's much more family, much more feminine. I was in New Orleans last year at the final, the Chiefs against the Eagles. Incredible, but a super nice spirit, passion, phenomenally interesting when you start to understand the game. In terms of communication, we were everywhere. I think everybody noticed that we are the partner there. Super smart people. They know what they're doing. It's a huge business. All these owners are multi-billionaires and they own the NFL and they have an incredibly professional organization and now they're rolling it out internationally. There are seven games outside of US. There was a game last week in Brazil and there will be many games in Europe, even India. So they're expanding it and it's something new for the rest of the world.
That's really cool. I love what you said about it being a family type of sport and I've always liked this tradition that they do before the game which is everyone goes to the parking lot and they have barbecues and cookouts and it's called tailgating, right? And it's multigenerational families and I think that's an amazing way to reach an all new audience.
