Not just cricket

Indian audiences may be glued to the screen this cricket season, but is the attention really all that consistent? So asks Star Plus.

Cricket and cinema are the two things Indians cannot live without, sure. And media planners, charged with the job of allocating scarce advertising funds to multiple media alternatives, have always tended to agree.

But Star Plus, India's No 1 general entertainment channel, has something to say to them: for consistency of audience, regular entertainment is still the best option, and buoyant even in this season of cricket euphoria.

Star Plus, actually, has been shouting itself hoarse for quite some time now that advertisers gain optimum value from "average television ratings" rather than peaks, and that this is what it offers.

Now, however, it has some TAM rating point figures "" these are arrived at from a sample of TV households installed with peoplemeters "" to give its argument some strength.

Cricket, says Star Plus, delivers "uncertain viewership". The size of the cricket audience could depend on whether India is winning or losing.

For instance, in the South Africa versus India one-day series held in November 2005, in the fourth match, as India's performance dipped towards the end, Indian viewership plunged""giving the match an average rating of a miserable 3.5.

In other words, India alone did not lose, but also all the brands that had taken the chance to put huge sums of money on the match by way of advertising.

When India won the fifth match, however, the ratings were better "" at an average rating of 8. The channel cites a similar pattern for the India-New Zealand-Zimbabwe three-way series last September. And then there's the risk of rain too.

For consistent brand exposure, stick with regular soap operas, game shows and the like, says Star Plus.

"Although cricket is an extremely attractive media buy, at the end of the day it's very risky as it is dependent on a variety of factors like who wins the toss, the performance of the team or the weather conditions," argues Paritosh Joshi, president ad sales, distribution, Star.

Star Plus, by contrast, has held its eyeballs firm. "This is primarily because we present genuine appointment viewing as our episodic narratives require regularity, as against cricket matches which can be caught anytime on radio, TV or the net," continues Joshi.

Commenting on the motive behind this TAM comparison study, Joshi adds, "As a media vehicle, it's in our interest to constantly work and figure out our competitive advantage. We needed to find out whether cricket is really the worthwhile investment it's so hyped to be."

Will media planners listen?

This depends on their own independent judgments, as TAM says. "TAM feeds the industry with figures on the basis of which corporates and media planners do their own analysis," says a TAM source.

This audience gauge commands a large following among media planners, despite occasional grumbles about its representative accuracy ever since it turned into a monopoly.

But if planners continue to plough funds into the current Indo-Pak cricket series, it may be for an entirely different set of reasons.

One, Ten Sports has unprecendented subcontinental reach despite being a satellite TV channel, with access to Doordarshan homes as well.

For another, there's enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that Indo-Pak matches are like none other, and not only because of all the hairstyle histrionics that go with the game.