CRICKET: Festive season may help ICL catch regional as well as national advertisers.
The twenty-20 Indian Premier League organised by the Board for Control of Cricket in India in May and June was unsurpassed in scale as well as popularity. Moreover, it was aimed to kill once and forever the challenge thrown up by the rebel Indian Cricket League launched by Subhash Chandra of the Essel Group.
Still, ICL is ready to return with another round of twenty-20 cricket tournament which will start on October 10 and end on November 29. The event will coincide with the festive season in the country. The weather too in most parts of the country will have turned pleasant by then.
The Essel Group has pumped Rs 60 crore into the tournament. This includes a brand new stadium at Ahmedabad and an expensive marketing campaign created by FCB Ulka. The multi-media campaign will break next week and talk about the players, local talent and the Essel group and ICL, sources in the advertising industry say.
The ICL matches will be shown live on Ten Sports and Zee Sports, both Zee-owned channels. ICL is in negotiations with various companies to rope in one presenting sponsor (Rs 10-15 crore) and four on-air and on-ground sponsors (Rs 5-10 crore each), Essel Group sources say.
At the moment, ICL functionaries sound upbeat. “Our new stadium in Ahmedabad will be the fourth venue after Panchkula, Hyderabad and Gurgaon. We are in advanced talks with both national and regional advertisers and we will make the announcement very soon,” says ICL Senior Vice-president (marketing & operations) Shariq Patel.
The moot question is, will advertisers put money in ICL? Overall, ad budgets are tight. In addition, several fancy properties of BCCI as well as the International Cricket Council are going to be up for grabs soon.
Most important, the last edition of ICL did not really set the television screens on fire. While the average ratings of ICL matches on Zee Sports and later on Ten Sports hovered around 0.6-1 per cent, IPL’s ratings zoomed to around 4 per cent and even brought down the viewership of general entertainment channels.
Some experts say, ICL may just be able to pull it off as the matches will be held during the festive season, when about one-third of advertising budgets of the companies are spent within a short span of two months.
According to media planners, there is a long list of both national and regional brands that want to break the clutter during the upcoming Diwali festivities. “If ICL gets a healthy rating of 2 per cent or more on a consistent basis, then even the big advertisers will come in. However, there are enough brands in the regional arena who would not mind coming on board ICL,” says a Delhi-based media planner.
“The favorable thing for ICL’s second coming is the lack of any expectations from the tournament. This can only help ICL if the quality of cricket and the packaging becomes classy and the viewers begin to sample it. When that happens, there will be advertisers who will put in money,” adds another media expert.
According to informed sources, soft-drink maker Rasna, packaged water producer Aava and ice-cream maker Vadilal are in talks with ICL to sponsor Gujarat's home team, Ahmedabad Rockets. Similarly, a number of regional advertisers from Andhra Pradesh and Punjab are also in talks with ICL for branding associations, the sources add.
In the last tournament, the eight teams of ICL had a mix of national and regional sponsors including Dabur, Cotton County, Rashmi Builders and Rishi Cements. "Both existing and new sponsors are talking to us and there will be adequate sponsors on-board, I can assure you," Patel says.
According to Essel Group insiders, ICL will make money in the third to fifth year of its launch and till then, the group will make all necessary investments to establish the brand and its mission of giving chance to promising cricketers who otherwise would have not been able to make it on the national scene.
