On the hunt for eyeballs

 

 

ESPN’s big buzz big bucks marketing campaign (Rs 100 crore) to promote two of the biggest cricketing events of this year – Champions Trophy and Champions League – seems to have failed to make an impact. Both the events have bombed and couldn’t garner decent ratings. For the Champions Trophy, which was the ODI tournament played among eight international teams, bad performance was still anticipated as ODIs have been losing audience to Twenty20. But shockingly, the much-hyped Champions League, which was the first international club cricketing event, got an even poorer response from the audience.

Sample this: Champions League's opening TRP was a pathetic 0.9 and so far, the average of the tournament is even worse 0.7 (source: aMap). These ratings are lower than the recently concluded Champions Trophy, which got average ratings of 1.1 and Twenty20 World Cup 2009 (held earlier this year), which garnered average ratings of 2.1. Even shows on a niche channel like MTV get a better rating than this (Splitsvilla season 2 on MTV got an average TRP of 1.5). The poor performance of T20 on the idiot box is shocking, keeping in mind the fact that cricket is generally considered a sure shot eyeball grabber in the country. And the best example of this is Multi Screen Media’s Set Max, which got a new life due to its broadcast of IPL tournaments. The attraction of cricketing events in the country can be gauged from the fact that general entertainment channels don’t launch any new show during the IPL tournament. In fact, even Bollywood biggies avoid releasing movies when the IPL is on. Historically too, cricketing events garner ratings much higher than popular TV shows on entertainment channels. But Champions League is nowhere near the popular soaps on GECs. Yeh Rishta… on Star Plus averaged 4.56 and Balika Vadhu on Colors got 4.19 ratings, six times higher than the average of the ongoing Champions League. These poor ratings surely mean bad news for the sports broadcaster ESPN. In September last year, the channel paid $975 million for commercial rights of the T20 Champions League for ten years – it’s most expensive cricket acquisition. The channel has paid a humongous $1 billion for this deal. Add to that the channels’ marketing budget of Rs 100 crore for the two tournaments: Champions Trophy and Champions League. As per industry reports, Rs 40 crore alone was spent on promoting Champions League. Nirmal Dayani, Senior Director – Marketing, ESPN, explains, “A larger chunk of the planned media investments is going into developing the Champions League format as it is relatively new for the viewer and will take some time to pick up.” Media planners agree that the sports broadcaster went all gung ho about the Champions League because it wanted to cash in on the huge popularity of the IPL and emulate the success of Set Max. As Dayani admits, “After watching tournaments like IPL and T20 World Cup, people can easily relate to the format. However, it may take some time to get familiar with the international club teams. But we are confident that it has the potential to become a unique cricket property for us." But unlike the IPL, Champions League has failed to grab eyeballs.

So why has this first attempt at international club cricket failed despite the phenomenal popularity of the T20 format? The answer is simple: the basic business model of Champions League has many chinks. First – the popularity of IPL is not necessarily an indication of an interest in club cricket model. Instead, the enthusiasm was related to the merger of the two biggest religions in the country (films and cricket). Thus Champions League, which is basically a club cricket event without the starry attraction of Bollywood, doesn’t have much appeal. Moreover, most of the teams (apart from the three IPL teams) playing in the Champions League are not well known which takes out the starry attraction of Indian cricket too.

Out of the twelve teams competing in the tournament, only three (The Royal Challengers Bangalore, Delhi Daredevils and Deccan Chargers) represent India. So there is no real patriotic fervour associated with the event either. Thus an audience finds no reason to watch the matches. Sanjay Jha, Founder of CricketNext wrote in his blog, “The Champions League is a guaranteed failure as a business model as it has none of the passionate adoration of the European football league across multiple countries. The only way this ridiculous imitation (of EPL) will ever work is if there are sufficient Indian players playing in the foreign leagues for us Indians to follow their cricketing heroics.” But this again is a rare possibility keeping in mind the BCCI’s strategy to discourage any free market forces to influence its monopolisation of Indian cricket. Moreover, matching BCCI’s pay scale is really not possible for most of the cricket clubs.

However, the bigger question, beyond the failure of a format is: Is the overdose of cricket actually killing the sport? Well, the answer increasingly is a definite yes. And unfortunately, it's not just killing cricket; it's killing the average Indian's huge appetite for the game, a trend that is very clearly reflected in the ever falling TRPs of the matches. On an average, an ODI or a T20 gets a TRP varying between below one to five nowadays, and it's a rare incident when they touch ratings of six or above. But a few years back cricket matches used to get ratings in double digits. And it's not about a single tournament. Broadcasters today are lining up in hordes for grabbing 10 or 15-year deals of various cricketing events, hence shedding billions of dollars. But is the audience ready to take that kind of an overdose or is the principle of diminishing marginal utility already playing its role? Well, lower TRPs and empty stadiums seem to suggest the latter. So it is high time that cricket boards and sports broadcasters rethink their strategy to keep the audience glued to the television set.