Board plans to go the Aussie wayMany Reasons Why BCCI Shouldn’t Kill The Golden Goose
TIMES NEWS NETWORKAn estimated 700 million people all over the world play chess. About 60 million play tennis and women among them constitute less than half that figure. Vishwanathan Anand is not only the reigning world champion in chess he is an all-time great, being one of only three people ever to have crossed the 2,800 ELO rating. Sania Mirza has not yet broken into the top 20 in women’s tennis. By any yardstick, Anand’s sporting achievements are way above anything Sania has done so far. Yet, there is absolutely no doubt that Sania is the bigger brand in India than Anand.
What does all this have to do with the BCCI? Everything. There is a lesson in the Sania-Anand comparison for the worthies who run cricket in India. Sania is a huge brand because the media has covered the ups and downs of her career so intensively, discussed and analysed her game threadbare, while Anand has much fewer column inches, and certainly much fewer photographs, published on him in newspapers.
The short point - and the lesson for BCCI - is that the media is crucial for adding value to sporting brands. The reams of stuff written about sporting personalities, the large pictures published, the analysis, pre-event build-ups, all go into making icons out of them.
The BCCI seems completely oblivious of this process by which sportspersons become icons and brands. It seems to believe Indian cricketers become folk heroes purely because of its patronage to them. Only such a blinkered perspective can explain its willingness to go the way of Cricket Australia and demand that media should pay for using images of cricketers, since they are the board’s property.
The board is planning to get sponsors for teams playing in the T20 Indian Premier League for crores of rupees. Would these sponsors come on board if they were not confident of their logos being splashed by the media and, in the process, reach audiences of millions? Clearly, the BCCI has not figured that the media adds value not just to the cricketers brand, but also to the amount sponsors are willing to cough up to have their logos displayed by these cricketers.
If the board did its maths it would realize that the money they hope go garner by making photo agencies and the media pay for images of cricketers would be piffling compared to the mega bucks it makes from sponsors. If the media boycotts cricket matches - as it has boycotted the Australia-Sri Lanka series - the sponsors will certainly lose their enthusiasm. It should be clear that the BCCI gains as much by providing the media free access to its cricketers as the media gains by writing on them.
Indeed, if the BCCI’s logic were to be accepted that the media gains by printing pictures of cricketers, the media too could also demand that it be paid a portion of the sponsorship money by the BCCI for providing the audience.
If the BCCI sticks to its current stance of making media pay for the images, the consequences will be bad for both the sides. Small newspapers that struggle to keep their head above water will be forced to reduce visual coverage to keep costs in check. That would reduce the popularity of the game and hurt particularly in the small towns ^ the very areas from which Indian cricket has of late been tapping talent.
The other media companies, too, would then be justified in demanding that either the BCCI shares its sponsorship revenues with them or else they would start blurring out sponsors logos from images, which would obviously mean the sponsors would be willing to pay BCCI much less than they would otherwise have done - that is, if they come forward at all to sponsor BCCI events.
All this debate can be made irrelevant if the BCCI recognises that sports associations and media have a win-win relationship that works to their mutual advantage and to the advantage of the fans.
Rather than let its greed run amok, the BCCI should stick to the earthy dictum: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
>> Taken from TOI Bangalore edn dated 15th Nov.
