Ad paradox

GUEST COLUMN

What works better: product placement or TV advertising? For marketing men trying to decide which medium will provide them the maximum brand exposure, the results of Comperio Research's study should prove interesting.

Comperio Research, part of the Mark McCormack group of companies, globally monitors and evaluates over 10,000 hours of sports coverage on various product placement aspects.

It studied the exposure received by brands during the live telecast on Ten Sports of the first India-Pakistan one-day cricket match, on March 13, 2004.

For the study, exposure was defined as brand or logo that is visible on the screen for a minimum of one second, with at least 66 per cent of the name or logo clearly legible. Where more than one source of the same brand appears in a camera shot, the level of exposure for the most prominent source is counted.

Here is an analysis of comparison between product placement and advertising exposure.

The broad picture

Product placement generated about one hour and 57 minutes of exposure for 25 brands, across eight hours and 47 minutes of play. This exposure does not include frequently-seen signage sources such as players' clothing.

On the other hand, in all there were 188 commercial breaks totalling 4,100 seconds (about one hour and eight minutes), during which 30 different brands were advertised.

Advertiser and sponsor brands could be divided into nine broad categories. Of these, exposure from product placement was higher in the first six.

Brand-wise analysis

A comparison was made of brands that were present as both sponsors as well as TV advertisers.

No clear conclusions emerge from comparing the exposure brands received in terms of duration during commercials, versus non-TV commercial (TVC) elements. Overall however, brands got a much larger share of the duration pie through the non-TVC platform.

In the Indo-Pak cricket series, Samsung was the title sponsor, Hero Honda the co-sponsor, while Pepsi Pakistan was the official sponsor of the host team. Other major associate sponsors were LG, Glaxo Smithkline, IOC, Hutch and Maruti.

Sources of exposure

Hero Honda, Pepsi and Samsung received much higher exposure from product placement than from commercials.

While Hero Honda and Pepsi received all their exposure from signage (perimeter board, wickets and so on), Samsung's exposure came from graphics (action replay, bowling statistics and so on) and oral sources (the commentary), apart from signage.

Among signage sources, it was the perimeter boards that yielded maximum exposure. Monitoring of signage sources by brand and location on the field can help in estimating where on the field a brand name or logo, if placed, is likely to get maximum exposure.

Combined with viewership date, this exposure data can be used to evaluate the average opportunity to see a brand on a given source.

Brand sightings

During the match, each advertiser on average aired six commercials. Ad s for Samsungwere the most frequent (18) followed by Bajaj and ACP Gold, which aired 15 ads each.

The mean duration per ad was 22 seconds. That means that even if each commercial was taken as 22 brand sightings (one sighting per second), the total non-TVC sightings is far higher than the brand/logo sightings possible in commercials.

Moreover, since they were more frequent, the non-TVC sightings were better spread across the match, providing more opportunity to see.

It's an ad world

It is estimated that advertisers paid more than Rs 10 lakh for a 30-second spot on Ten Sports during the one-day Indo-Pak matches.

But, thanks to rising ad spot rates and increasing ad clutter, many advertisers are now moving towards promoting their brands using soft advertising.

In 1993, there were about 4,000 brands advertised on TV; by 2003, this number had shot up to 11,000, a 180 per cent increase.

On average, an urban consumer in India is exposed to 350 to 400 TV commercials every week. But nearly 60 per cent of India's 43 million cable and satellite homes have TV sets with remote controls, so they can skip all ads.

And, given that the viewership gap between programmes and advertisements on TV has been increasing with time, a programme with a high TV rating does not necessarily imply the same audience for the commercial breaks also.

In the US, viewers are now resorting to pay TV, which air channels without the ads. And intelligent digital video recording technology such as TiVo enables viewers to skip commercials.

Soon, such technology may be available to Indian television viewers also. Advertisers will then have to resort even more to non-TVC ways of getting their message across.

Click here for table

(Deepak Halan is senior research manager, Comperio Research. His email is: dhalan@comperioworld.com)