Hansie vanishes from suitings ad, more cricketers may follow suit

Even as TV Channels continued with endless hours of discussions on the match-fixing charges levelled by Delhi Police against Cronje and four of his teammates, there came the inevitable break. One of them featured an ad spot with Cronje and some of his teammates modelling for the suiting. This morning however, the agency decided to pull out the ad.

Insiders in the ad world say that the recent spate of Indian losses in Australia had in any case reduced the marketability of cricket and dwindling audiences at the venues were another indication of reduced interest. It is rumoured that Buddha Films, which had the marketing rights for the first Tests against South Africa lost more than Rs. 30 crore, partly because the matches were shown on the low-profile DD Sports Channel. But they made up somewhat by dropping the ad rates (from Rs 1.60 lakh to almost Rs 60,000 per 10-second spot in some cases) and also because the matches were shifted to DD’s main channel.

Add to this the plummeting image of cricket, and it is clear that it is not just cricket that stands to lose, but even the cricketers could make way forfilm stars in future campaigns, if marketing manager’s views are anything to go by.

Said a marketing executive, “Most big advertisers have cricketers and film stars on their list and they have ad films with both. If the cricketers are not performing we fall back on film stars, otherwise spots with cricketers makes greater sense during cricket telecast.”

So we could well see a trend of Shah Rukh, Kajol or Karishma forcing their way ahead of the cricketers. And certainly, foreign players in Indians ads could become a rarity.

Even as the reverberations of the scandal could be felt in the corporate community, another executive, whose company spends more than 50 per cent of ad budget on cricket, said, “It is too early to say what effect this incident is going to have on advertising relating to cricket, but one thing is sure, it has set us thinking.”

Meanwhile the live telecast of the Asian XI versus the Rest of the World XI match in Dhaka being played today to mark the ICC Cricket Week, seemedunaffected. No less than 32 products were advertised in one one-hour segment. “There would have been no time for any of the advertisers to pull out at this stage. With satellite channels, it often takes 24 to 48 hours for a release to be cancelled,” an ad man hastened to add.

Another interesting viewpoint is that, advertising during cricket matches may not suffer — because they would still have a large audience — and some ad guys could actually make campaigns lampooning the game. Doubtless cricketers stand to lose even on this account.

There are three ways of advertising vis-a-vis cricket. One is to take the title-sponsorhip; second is through endorsements; and the third is to simply buy media during cricket matches on the premise that a large number of people are watching the match. In the first two cases, the campaign is specifically focussed on cricket and in the third it does not matter, the focus is on the product.