Unlike everybody else who's said something about the IPL, I haven't watched a single ball. In fact, the last time I settled in front of a TV was the last world cup "" soccer, not cricket. I did watch snatches of a programme called "We the People" on International Women's Day (March 8). That evening, I was in the company of somebody who participated in that specific episode and it felt polite to let the meaningless soundbytes wash over me. |
I don't possess a satellite TV connection and I didn't have cable for years before that. This is not because there isn't stuff on TV that I wouldn't mind watching. I'm a fan of soccer, tennis and cricket. Also of Kylie Minogue (I prefer to watch her wriggling on mute). Once in a while, the History Channel does something entertaining as well.
I'm enough of a sports fan to have called in favours to acquire game footage post-facto. A friend in Italy sends me soccer (including Copa Americana matches, mostly not available in India). I get tennis programming from somebody else, who commutes between London and Delhi.
I get my hands on cricket after it is aired, though I would rather not go into the specifics of the delivery system. I follow cricket live on the Net, where there are a half-dozen sites offering running commentary. Then I place "orders" for the games I want to see. I have watched the 20-20 World Cup and before that, the "Vanilla" World Cup. I watched the recent Indian tour of Australia as well. Only I didn't watch any of it on TV and I watched it stripped of advertising.
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When the IPL was being put together, I actually spent some time analysing the auctioning system to help one of the teams bid. The team made several counter-intuitive bids. It's doing well so far, and I have every intention of catching up with the IPL. Probably a month later, though.
I like cricket (and soccer and Kylie Minogue). But I dislike being a captive audience for advertising. Big sports events leave me conflicted. My desire to watch live action is usually at war with my instinct for self-preservation.
My brain shuts down at the thought of undergoing my personal version of Groundhog Day by sitting through 100-odd repetitions of the same ads in 3 hours. At my age, there is a chance of lapsing into a persistent vegetative state and never coming out of coma. It is at least as likely as my going out and buying whatever the advertisers want me to buy.
If it's soccer, the pull of the game is sometimes strong enough to overcome my aversion to advertising. It helps that soccer is fast-flowing without too much scope for commercial breaks. One can switch off and refill tankards at lemon time. That's not true for either cricket or tennis with their intermittent action and multiple breaks.
There is very little entertainment capable of surviving endless repetition. I don't think I could watch The Seven Samurai a dozen times over in succession. Or listen to Maria Callas perform Lady Macbeth endlessly. Even a very clever creative ad is unlikely to measure up to those standards.
So tell me, why do our creative, imaginative, advertising mavens believe that the programming they put together retains viewer interest when aired a hundred times a day for weeks in succession? Would it add that much to the marginal costs to make different ads and mix them up? Or to take a leap of faith and let the commentators do their thing with a banner running across screen saying "Commentary, courtesy XYZ"? If somebody did that, I might just go out and acquire a connection again.