With the World Cup and IPL 4 coming up, we ought to have been filled with a sense of pleasant anticipation. Instead, many of us are feeling as if we are on our way to the dentist.
Reason: Those ghastly ads on TV.
Like music, which, in order to be fully appreciated, must be heard in silence, cricket also needs to be watched, if not in total silence, then at least quietly and without visual distractions. Regrettably, Indian crowds at the ground and TV watchers tend to babble incessantly.
And to add to this infamy, we now have those tasteless ad campaigns that ruin the game. Indeed, I have now coined a new definition of a nanosecond – it is the time that elapses between the last ball played at, and the ad coming on.
Why, during India's tour of South Africa last year, Ten Cricket even had ads between balls! Some of them made enormous crashing sounds like that ridiculous mobile phone ad. Needless to say, at all other times the screen was reduced by about a third with those awful creepy-crawlies. One only has to watch non-Indian broadcasts to see how awful the Indian cricket TV experience is.
Good idea?
I would dearly like to know why an advertiser thinks that repeatedly annoying a potential customer is a good idea. It is easy to understand a channel's greed. After all, it has been a victim of the BCCI's greed and needs to recoup what it has paid for the broadcasting rights, perchance to make a profit.
If I am not mistaken, the ICC limits the number of minutes of advertising in an hour. This means that if the channels charge an arm and a leg, they must divide the slot into a large number of small ads rather than a few long ads.
But what of the advertisers? Do they seriously think it is a good idea to buy those annoying five-second slots that crowd the screen while the game is in progress? If they do, they must be dumber than I thought.
Or maybe not, because people tend to either mute the TV during ad breaks or wander off to the kitchen or the loo. So why not have the ads while the game is on?
That sounds rational except that it is not. I did a small survey once to see how many recalled those products. The recall was high all right, but so was the irritation quotient. The responses usually took the form of “That mucking ... ad”.
Utter disregard
Why such utter disregard for the viewer's preferences? Is this such a big mystery at all?
One must assume that the advertisers don't want a negative recall of their product. But the fact that they still don't discourage the channel from inserting their ads while the ball is in play suggests they have not realised that they may be wasting their money and that the only beneficiary is the channel.
So I would suggest that the Advertising Association of India or its equivalent quickly commission a survey to find out. They will be surprised by the findings and we may still be spared the agony of Indian-style advertising during the World Cup and IPL.