Much nostalgia, some regret

It is a little over three decades since I left Madras (as it was called then) and my mind goes back to the great times I had in that wonderful city. Madras was a great place to grow up even if it was 108 degrees in May. Who cared about the heat if one was chasing balls at the Marina cricket ground? A wonderful place to watch a cricket match and hear the Triplicane mamas waxing eloquent on which side of the wicket Derek Underwood should bowl from and the raucous chants of budding club cricketers whose wit far exceeded their cricketing ability. A phenomenal place to absorb culture even if you were only marginally inclined, and an easy city to live in, if only you knew the language.

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Why Most Advertising Does Not Turn On A “Madrasi”

Ramanujam Sridhar was invited by CNBC TV-18 Storyboard to write an article on their guest blog. Please find the same article below.

It is festival time. Diwali is almost upon us. While Diwali is a festival that all of India celebrates with varying degrees of intensity, several other festivals are regional and not celebrated with the same fervor in all parts of India. Like Onam for instance which happened a couple of months ago, which to Malayalis (the people from God’s own country) is a big thing. Well a friend of mine remembered me on Onam. He is from Mumbai and really likes me (or so I believe) and he woke me up at an unearthly hour (it was seven thirty for God’s sake) and said at his cheeriest best “Happy Onam! Isn’t today a big day for you?” Whilst I grumpily thought that it might have been a better day if I had slept a little longer, I realized that this guy actually meant well. What the hell, he did not realize that I was a Tamilian; after all we are all Madrasis aren’t we? So what’s the problem? The problem is most (oh okay a lot really) of advertising that is created in the North of India (oh okay include Mumbai as well) has a similar haziness about the people of South India and consequently has little impact on people like me.

Can’t read, write or speak

I was born and brought up in the city (?) of Madras as it used to be called in those days. My generation grew up right in the middle of the ‘anti Hindi agitation’. Several of my friends favorite slogan was “Hindi down, down”. Now it is not that we felt strongly about the language but used the situation to just not learn the language. Many people of my generation don’t read, write or speak the language. Of course I am one of the few that can speak a sort of language that may pass for Hindi after you have had a couple of really stiff ones. Several others of my friends would not even try. And while the next generation may be marginally better, it neither shares the prowess nor the interest of my North Indian friends in that pleasant language. So here is my question to some of the best creative minds in India. How relevant is a lot of your advertising that is conceptualized, executed and released in Hindi to most of us? Of course I need to clarify that the problem is not as intense in Karnataka or Andhra as it is in Tamil Nadu or Kerala.

The real thing takes a bus to Chennai

I am sure some of you have seen the Coke commercial. Let me with my limited powers of expression try to explain the script to you. There is a young man who wants to go home to Delhi for Diwali and is stuck without a mode of transport except a battered down bus. The people around him seem from Shillong or thereabout look at him blankly. He opens his Coke only for life to be transformed. There is music, dancing, the bottle assumes magical proportions and the bus driver who looks a lot like Hashim Amla at the age of sixty, suddenly smiles and takes him to Delhi in the same bus which now looks like a golden chariot. I am sure you get the drift. Now I am hardly the target audience for Coke, so I don’t want to get into the effectiveness of the ad, but am only going to talk about the same ad in Tamil. Everything else is the same. The same cute kid stranded in the Himalayas, the same bemused Tibetan faces, the same Pathan driver and what is the difference. The kid wants to go to Chennai? From the Himalayas? Give me a break or better still a Pepsi! And mind you most Tamilians like me have seen the original and the translation (?) if you can call it that.

Is there a better way?

The average commercial conceptualized in Hindi and translated into Tamil is badly done. The translators must have been banished from Tamil Nadu in the sixties, so stilted are their expressions. It is compounded by Shah Rukh Khan speaking Tamil, or someone doing a passable imitation of him. The Khans mean nothing in our neck of the woods which Coke realized years ago. Our celebrities are different as are our aspirations, as someone said “it is a different country”. While that may be an exaggeration, there is no denying the fact that it needs attention. Asian Paints did a Pongal commercial over twenty years ago, which was created in Tamil for Tamilians. The same Asian paints did a wonderful translation of the Sunil Bhai commercial which became part of the local lingo. The Cadburys Dairy Milk Diwali commercial is a brilliant example of communication that is targeted and created for this market. Tamilians want to be spoken to in their language. Period.

I know enough about arguments about production costs and how Tamil Nadu is just another market. But a one size fits all, cannot work in this country with its diversity, complexity and language bias. Who said advertising was easy?

Talk to me in my language and I will listen and better still buy from you. Don’t pass me hand me downs or concepts created for the cow belt! There was a time when mobile phone manufacturers shipped those models that did not sell in other parts of the world. Now what do they do? They launch here as India is the happening market. Tamil Nadu could well be your happening market, if you are ready to recognize and more importantly accept it. On our terms! We are a very considerate people you see!!!

Ramanujam Sridhar

CEO
brand – comm.
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Sponsors in a spot

Match-fixing allegations enervate audiences, and marketers would do well to have alternative strategies in place..

There used to be a fairly banal script idea in the Tamil films that I used to see several years ago. See if this sounds familiar: There is a doting husband and a pretty wife with dubious morals. The husband reluctantly leaves his wife to go on a foreign trip and barely has he reached the airport before the wife gets her paramour into the house. The flight is cancelled for technical reasons (long live Air India) and the husband returns home, only to find his wife in a stranger's arms in his own bed. The poor man is devastated, loses reason, sees red and kills his wife. He goes to jail, becomes a misogynist and goes around wearing a shawl in the salubrious Tamil Nadu weather singing sad songs!

Sounds familiar, even ludicrous and only serves to confirm our already poor opinion about Tamil films, right? But there is nothing ludicrous about what happened in cricket recently with the Pakistani cricket team and with all the evidence of spot fixing that has been aired on every television channel and spewed forth on every Web site and newspaper. I am sure thousands of cricket lovers, me included, would empathise with the husband in the Tamil movie and feel he was not as weird as they thought he was initially, as now I can understand what people can do when they are let down badly by the people they love. I don't blame some of the Pakistani supporters for taking to the streets as they have been let down again by their beloved cricketers and even more by their administrators who still talk about “conspiracy theories”, even if they have been pushed to reluctantly suspending the three tainted players.

Spare a thought for me

I felt particularly aggrieved as, when match after match of boring cricket was happening in the sub-continent featuring some of our own stars, I chose to watch Pakistan take on Australia and England under the cloudy skies of the English summer and revelled at the way the Pakistanis made the ball talk, not knowing that a lot of the conversation was happening with shady characters from the betting world as well. Poor, unsuspecting me! It was singularly gratifying to watch the talented 18-year-old make batsmen such as Ricky Ponting, Andrew Strauss and Kevin Pietersen look like schoolboys on their first outing. Sadly, though, it is not the image of the swinging ball beating the bat, but the repeated sight of Aamer's extended front foot well over the crease, shown time and time again on every TV channel in the country, which is going to haunt not only me but the sponsors who have put in hundreds of crores in India.

Suddenly many of the Australians too are talking about being approached while they were playing earlier against Pakistan, in London and during the Champions Trophy. Atul Wassan, who has been involved with the IPL too, spoke as though players being approached by bookies was as common as being propositioned by a sex worker in the shadier parts of any city!

What was all hunky dory suddenly seems to be as murky as hell, and the entire future of the game is being threatened. If this will not give sponsors sleepless nights, one wonders what else will. For once faith is lost and then everything comes into the realm of doubt and uncertainty. Was Mike Hussey's unforgettable innings in the World Cup semi-final against Pakistan (arguably the greatest innings ever played in the T20 big stage) for real? Was Australia's victory at Sydney truly a jail break and as dramatic as it seemed to me when I watched it first on Star Cricket? Is any cricket match involving Pakistan real at all? If a five-day test match in an alien land can be influenced, what about the shorter versions such as the Champions League, the IPL and, horror of horrors, the 50-over World Cup, which is to be held in the sub-continent early next year?

How safe are any of these? Will I watch any of these? And what about millions of others who may be sharing the same doubt as me and may not be articulating them? What is going to be our reaction when the bowler, albeit genuinely, bowls a “no-ball”? Will we exult at the ensuing “free hit” or wonder about the bowler's integrity? What happens when a fielder drops a catch? While we do know that even the best of fielders can drop a catch, will our thoughts go to the sitters dropped by Younis Khan and Kamran Akmal, who continues to be a darling of the Pakistani selectors even if he has given a new dimension to terms such as “butterfingers” and “iron gloves”? Will the ardent cricket fan continue to watch the game? I am not so sure.

It is money and more of the same

I would be the last to grudge players what is due to them, for they are the ones who bring in the crowds. I used to travel to different parts of the world to watch Gilchrist bat and Warne bowl. Similarly, I am sure that spectators from all parts of the world would come to watch Sehwag and Sachin take on the best of the world.

But it does seem horribly inequitable that the best talent that the world has seen in recent times — Mohammed Aamer (whatever his current ills) — gets paid less for bowling 60 overs in a five-day test match than Ishant Sharma got paid for bowling one ball in the IPL, never mind the fact that the ball was bowled at a ferocious 125 km per hour as that poor lad seems to have lost his pace and his rhythm!

Still, inequity does not excuse the diabolical acts of the captain and his two champion bowlers. Nor do I know if you can entirely blame the political system and the total chaos that seems to prevail in that country that dooms everything including the cricket team. But the issue of wide disparities in incomes of players certainly seems to be an issue. The larger issue is the fact that the governing body – and that means the ICC – is toothless as evidenced by the fact that the tour is still on despite widespread criticism. For the ICC and the PCB it seems to be business as usual no-ball or not.

Where is the Plan B?

A few years ago, I heard an interesting comment on the brand strategies of Indian companies. The speaker said with the straightest of faces “Most companies have a Plan B, which comes into operation when the original plan fails. In India though most companies have a ‘Plan Big B'. When all else fails use Amitabh as your brand endorser.” Well, not an exaggeration, as Amitabh, if my memory serves me right, did 67 commercials in 2004! I wonder if companies have a similar attitude to cricket as they seem to be bitten by the cricket bug despite all the chaos that one can patently see.

I wonder how the IPL will be run without the high-profile founder and as for the Champions League, despite all the hype, I still believe it is likely to be a damp squib, maybe competing with the Commonwealth Games in appeal. Okay, maybe I am exaggerating but the game of cricket is under serious threat and seems to lurch from one crisis to the other. There is a complete and total lack of leadership with most boards, and the leader of the pack is the ICC, which seems to be focused on everything except the long-term interest of the game.

I am sure the sponsors are familiar with the term caveat emptor. They must look out for themselves as the administrators do not have the will to get their house in order. The malaise is too deep-rooted and the spot fixing episode is not the first problem, nor is it likely to be the last. If I were putting my money in cricket, I would seriously have an alternative strategy in place.

Software companies did this. It is called “de-risking”. They looked at markets such as Europe and Japan when the US tanked and at least came out alive. What efforts have the companies who are wedded to cricket made to look for alternatives? I am sure the next few big events that India has interests in – the Champions League, the World Cup and the IPL – have to be watched carefully as a mess in any of these can deal the game a body blow. Indian companies should seriously look at neutral games such as the Ashes, where at least the shadow of fixing does not arise, and move on to safer pastures over a period in time. I am reasonably sure that our sponsors have a different view from my gloomy one. For once, I hope I am wrong for I love the game and what I have got from it but worry for its future.

PS: While still on the subject of Amitabh Bachchan, I have a doubt. Is it true that only cricketers should retire? What about actors? At 68, hasn't he had too long a run? I just cannot bear to watch the Champions League commercials. I only hope the games are better than the ads!

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly: Branding on Indian Turf. He blogs at www.ramanujamsridhar.blogspot.com.)