Lifebuoy from Hindustan Lever used the more popular football and hockey to sell itself as the ‘health soap’.
I intentionally started the chapter on sports with something other than cricket, since most of this chapter is about cricket after all.
Ramachandra Guha, bestselling historian and an IIM-C alumnus, points out that cricket was first played on Indian soil in 1721 by British sailors near Cambay. It was only in the 1830s that Parsis started playing the game. The formation of Hindu Gymkhana in 1866 and the Muslim cricket club in 1886 saw all communities embracing cricket1.
Growing up in the ’60s, cricket match tickets were truly prized possessions. Five-day test match tickets were difficult to obtain; often a ticket was shared between many friends, brothers and cousins. I remember bunking school and spending a day at the Chennai Test between India and England only to watch Bapu Nadkarni bowl thirty-two maiden overs and Ken Barrington bat right through the whole day! We did have a Nawab as the captain of the Indian cricket team. The discourse around sports and cricket changed dramatically in 1983 after Kapil Dev and his boys won the World Cup Cricket Tournament, unseating Clive Lloyd’s formidable team.
Suddenly, there was a young man from Haryana, not to the manor born, leading the country to what was a fairytale victory. Most of the Indians who are fifty-plus will remember where they were when the final West Indies wicket fell.
Advertising soon started reflecting this new social truth. Reliance started using international cricketers Vivian Richards and Ravi Shastri in their advertising. Many other brands followed, and one brand literally danced its way into millions of hearts using cricket.
Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolates was facing a challenge in the early ’90s. The brand needed a fresh consumer insight to break out of its traditional ‘father-daughter’ routine which had worked its magic through the ’80s. Their campaign with the tag line ‘Sometimes Cadbury can say it better than words’ was well known, but the brand needed something more. The company, its advertising agency Ogilvy and its research agency IMRB went on a hunt to find out how to build new energy into the brand. They figured that if the brand, which was premium priced, had to grow, it had to attract a new set of users. The ‘kids only’ strategy had its limitations. How to target adults without alienating the core kid audience? It is rumoured that the agency team that was tasked to work on the brand remembered something they had seen on a cricket field and converted that into a Cadbury story.
A club match is in progress. The batsman has a ninety-nine score on the board. The crowd is well-dressed. We see a young woman eating a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar and the music starts. When the bowler bowls, the batsman goes for the big hit. The ball rises high, the crowd is wondering if it will find the hands of the fielder. We see the girl close her eyes and pray. The ball flies over the ropes and the fielder to become a sixer. The girl – dressed in a floral purple dress, purple being the Cadbury colour – is ecstatic. She leaps out of the stands with the chocolate in her hand, dodges the guard, runs on to the ground while performing probably the most absurd dance moves ever recorded in a television commercial. The product is shown and we hear the final pay off ‘Asli swad zindagi ka’ (The real taste of life) as she hugs her batsman friend. The ad, written by Piyush Pandey of Ogilvy & Mather and directed by Mahesh Mathai, would go down as one of the most remembered ads of the decade, maybe even several decades.
This advertisement did its magic for Cadbury, but also, more importantly, it broke the Cricket-Nawab-Suiting nexus. Though the Cadbury film showed ladies and gents in their Sunday best, sitting appropriately, the final dance broke that mirage. The final dance was purely animalistic and an expression of joy. After her famous dance, Shimona Rashi was permanently referred to as the Cadbury girl. In fact, even the late model-VJ turned film star, Sophia Haque had been, mistakenly, referred to as the Cadbury cricket model.
When I was speaking about this with my friend, columnist and market researcher Satyam Viswanathan, he pointed out that while the Cadbury ad may have changed some rules of the way cricket as a game is presented in advertising, the Nike Cricket film done in 2012 changed the discourse in many newer ways. Created for a brand that celebrates sporting excellence, this film took what we know as gully cricket and executed it at a totally different level. Done in 2012 by Sentil Kumar of JWT, the film starts with one of those crazy Indian traffic jams. The bus carrying a cricket team is stuck in traffic and one of the bowlers climbs on to the roof of the bus to look around. The game starts when another player climbs out with a cricket bat and asks him to bowl. The old and young start watching the match from their window, cheering the players along. Many passers-by join in, including an elephant. We also see Sreesanth and Zaheer of the then Indian cricket team stuck in the traffic as spectators. Finally, the biggest sports brand in the world acknowledged the real cricket that Indians play on their streets, with or without the traffic. The brand and its agency had been able to mine the Indian urban kitsch to create several such masterpieces.
COLOUR CODING: Have you noticed how the Cadbury girl is dressed in purple? Or the Santoor mom is dressed in orange? We call that ‘colour coding’, where the primary character in a film is dressed in the brand colours. This old custom continues though we are seeing exceptions too.
While cricket and cricketers have been used to promote all kinds of products including apparel, face wash, engine oil, energy drinks and colas, it is not as if Indian advertisers have totally avoided supporting and showcasing any other sports.
Cricket started out as the sport of the nawabs, but with the big World Cup victory of Kapil and his boys and the growing adaptation of cricket with tennis balls, the game grew new wings and flew right down to rural India. As cricket was travelling to rural India, urban India was discovering new games to play.
In one of the visionary long-term sponsorships, NIIT, India’s leading computer training institute has been supporting chess grandmaster, Vishwanathan Anand right through his meteoric rise. Vishy Anand appears in an occasional print advertisement, but is always photographed wearing a T-shirt with the NIIT logo up front.
Tata Group too had a film featuring kids and football which aired in 2005. Here, a group of kids are playing football in the pouring rain. In the final minutes, the goal keeper who is a kid afflicted by polio, leaps to save a goal. The film showcased the various aspects of the game like leadership, teamwork, grit, courage, respect, fearlessness and how they are relevant to a large corporate group like the Tatas.
India got its first marathon, organized as per the standards set by AIMS, the global marathon organization, in 2004. The Mumbai Marathon was a fun affair in the first year. I had managed to find myself at the finish line to see the Nigerian runners finish from close quarters. But big sponsorships came on board in 2005 when it became the Standard Chartered Marathon. Tata Consultancy Services too came on board as a joint sponsor. It is reported that there are probably more than a 100 marathons (42 km), half marathons (21 km) and 10 km runs in the country. Tata Consultancy Services also became the title sponsor of the New York City Marathon in 2014.
The metro city kids are now big fans of soccer and you can see them have many a serious argument about which English Premier League team is better, Chelsea or Man U. And in 2015, Tata Motors signed up the soccer superstar Lionel Messi as their global brand ambassador.
While new sports were gaining traction in urban India, it was cricket all the way for the whole country. Sociologists speak of three gods of India, the Film God, the Cricket God and the Religious God. Indians worshipped in front of these three deities.
Except for Kerala, sports in India was always a boy’s preoccupation; Kerala produced India’s first women athletes who could compete in the Olympics.
The narrative on cricket was also set to change with Sony bagging the telecast rights of World Cup Cricket 2003, 2007 and a host of ICC tournaments, for an astronomical amount. As Suman Srivatsav, who was then working at the ad agency handling the business, points out, the challenge
facing Sony was to bring a new host of affluent viewers to watch the cricket World Cup. Till then, cricket telecast was seen as an all-male affair. Except for using Ruby Bhatia for a small role, no cricket telecast had really tried to woo the female viewer. Sony figured out that if they could get both men and women to watch the World Cup, they would be able to attract a whole host of new viewers and also charge higher ad rates. They hit on the idea of using Mandira Bedi as one of the commentators. Mandira Bedi had a fairly big fan following after her stint on several television serials, such as Shanti, and was quite articulate in both Hindi and English. Her energy was palpable and, as Tony Greig observed, like the Indian cricket fan, Mandira is ‘Sometimes up, sometimes down, but never in the middle’. Sony used all its entertainment chops to make sure they hit all the right buttons. Mandira Bedi played her role to perfection, getting Charu Sharma to smile and Barry Richards to say things he may not have in any other circumstance. The ladies loved these comments, but they also loved Mandira’s dress sense. She virtually invented the ‘noodle-strap’ blouse on prime-time television. Mumbai Mid Day had a daily review on her dress sense and they called it the ‘Mandir-o-metre’. No wonder Sony managed to hit bullseye with their strategy. Cricket suddenly had hordes of women viewers.
If the stage had been set, it took yet another form of cricket to ramp it to the next level – the launch of the Indian Premier League (IPL) in 2008. It is true that the original Indian 20:20 cricket league was launched by the Zee Group as Indian Cricket League. However, BCCI with its tremendous power over players, officials and grounds took the domestic league to a level many would not have visualized. By bringing in Bollywood film stars, big business, international cricket stars and domestic cricket players together, IPL presented a heady mix. If USA has its Super Bowl, India has its IPL. Many brands create special campaigns to run for the forty-five-odd days of IPL. Brands such as Vodafone and Tata Docomo have even attempted to make over thirty commercials to run during the course of the IPL. And the audience is no longer just men. IPL too did its own advertising to get viewers to tune in and fans to get to the stadiums. While the man who orchestrated the whole parade, Lalit Modi, is a man of mystery, his creation, IPL, is bound to live on. George Bernard Shaw once reported to have said, ‘Cricket is a game played by eleven flannelled fools, watched by 11,000 fools.’ Well, the players are no longer in white flannels, and the audience is in millions and not thousands including women in large numbers.
Taking a leaf from IPL, we saw the launch of two other leagues in 2014. The Indian Super League (ISL) was presented as India’s answer to the major soccer/football leagues of the world. In yet another coup in 2014, we saw the launch of Pro Kabaddi League (PKL). Played in fancy new indoor stadia, the game hitherto played in dusty small towns of the country got a heavy dose of glamour and style. Here too, Bollywood stardust was added to bring in the eyeballs. It is said that the Kabbadi League almost broke even in the first year itself.
Both ISL and PKL can succeed if they replicate the IPL strategy of high-power advertising, exciting content, a heavy dose of glamour and online buzz. From what we saw in 2014, they are well on their way to becoming national obsessions. For both men and women.
If we have seen new leagues sprout all over, we also saw something arrive and disappear. Formula One racing came to India in 2011 with the opening of the Buddh International Circuit in Noida, UP. The racetrack, designed by global experts, is a masterpiece, and a far cry from the Sholavaram racetrack I used to visit as a school kid to see motorbike and car races. After organizing the Formula One races in Buddh for three years – 2011, 2012 and 2013 – the global Formula One organization pulled out. So we have not had any Formula One races since 2013. But the wonderful Buddh track has been used for several car launches and exciting test drives of new models. Tata Motors smartly brought truck racing to India at the Buddh racetracks in 2014 and had an even bigger event in 2015.
What has triggered all these new movements? And will we see more such developments?
India has been seen as a single sport country and this was even more accentuated after the World Cup Cricket win in 1983. The spread of television has made cricket stars recognized figures all over the country. However, as affluence has increased, there has been a growing desire to look at other sports. In some sense, cricket has become a game for the masses. The affluent want more types of games to follow and play. Football is growing in stature in the bigger cities. Badminton too has gained new traction with the success of Indian girls in the international arena. Games like golf and squash are finding niche appeal. Tennis, which was once in favour with Vijay Amritraj as the Indian face, is once again rising thanks to Leander Paes and Sania Mirza. Running, thanks to the marathon movement, has become a big sport. Unfortunately, hockey, a game Indians excelled in, has somewhere been left by the wayside despite the launch of the Indian Hockey League. Hopefully, it will get a second wind.
What does the future look like? Will India become a nation of sports lovers and not just cricket lovers? Will our kids be encouraged to play games and not just be textbook wonders?
With the growing penetration of mobile phones and smartphones, I suspect kids will be playing on their mobile phones and not in the playgrounds. An ad by Maggi done in 2014, starring Madhuri Dixit, has mothers playing football while the kids are playing video games and lazing about. The kids seeing their moms play join the real game. The film ends with the message and hashtag ‘#HealthIsEnjoyable’. Unfortunately, pressing the health button in its advertising did not help Maggi much as it got embroiled in a controversy regarding the contents in its pack in mid-2015. Fortunately for Madhuri Dixit and Maggi lovers, the brand seems to have recovered its mojo after dealing with the crisis.
Sports journalist Boria Majumdar writes about how Indians look across the border and lament at how backward we Indians are as compared to China when it comes to sports. He also says that the Indian sports machinery and organizations are a bit too complicated for India to adopt a unilinear approach to reviving Indian sports from its current stupor2. Therein lies the other big problem when we speak of India and sports. Unlike most parts of the developed and developing world, the emphasis placed on sports in Indian society is still abysmal. Many schools don’t even have playgrounds. Admission to institutes of higher learning have no emphasis on sports or extracurricular achievements. The latest formula seems to be the addition of big money, big business and media glamour; this may, in fact, give Indian sports and sportsmen their much-needed spot in the limelight.
While as a kid, most of us in the fifty-plus generation used to play in our neighbourhood streets. I wonder if this is possible in any Indian city today, even during the weekends. Finally, as we saw in the Nike cricket ad, we may have to let our kids play cricket on top of buses stuck in traffic. I hope and pray it does not come to that.
SECTION FOUR
AD NARRATIVES
Doodh Doodh Doodh, Wonderful Doodh
‘SIR, I AM thinking of immigrating to Australia. What do you think?’
The question floored me. I was sitting outside the recording studio of a young music director who I knew as Dilip Kumar. I had heard that he was once part of Ilayaraja’s group but had decided to try his own hand at music direction. I was trying to make a low-cost ad film for an ultra-low-cost roofing brand Literoof and my film producer had strongly recommended Dilip. I had heard some of his tracks and was impressed as hell. This was the year 1992. The country had just started tasting the winds of liberalization. We were waiting for the singer, Subha – who went on to become famous as Malgudi Subha – and were whiling away time outside the studio. I had no ready answer for Dilip, but managed to say that he would make a mistake by moving out of India just as it gets ready to grow drastically. Dilip did not sound convinced, but the singer arrived and we got busy.
If you were wondering who this young Dilip was, it is none other than music maestro AR Rahman. Let me assure you that many a film music director cut their teeth in crafting the per
fect thirty-second jingle. From Shankar Ehsan Loy to Ram Sampat, all of them have had their first innings in ad films. I am sure many more will follow their illustrious steps.
Indian advertising is today a cornucopia of innumerable types of music. We also have film music coming at us from all directions – radio, television, Internet radio stations and even mobile radio stations. But it was not this way some six decades ago.
BV Keskar, who headed the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting from 1952-1962, disliked film music because he believed that it corrupted Indian classical music. In 1952, he made sure that All India Radio would not play any film music1. He put in motion moves to encourage and nurture classical music on radio with events like the Akashvani Sangeet Sammelan. Interestingly, even today TM Krishna, the Carnatic music virtuoso continues the same tradition of being dismissive of film songs and their claims of classical (Carnatic) music lineage2.
Ameen Sayani, the radio advertising legend, recalls, ‘This happened at a time when Indian film music was the best medium for the spread of the national language and for the spread of togetherness … This was the golden period when the giants of Indian music were creating some great music’. If AIR did not play their favourite songs, there were others who did.
Keskar’s move gave birth to Radio Ceylon which started a thriving commercial broadcasting service aimed at the Indian sub-continent and aired one of the biggest hits on radio, Binaca Geetmala. The first broadcast of the programme in 1952 garnered an astounding 9000 letters when they were expecting just about fifty.
The government of India had an epiphany after the rise of Radio Ceylon. It launched Vividh Bharati Service in 1957 to broadcast film music and other popular formats, though radio advertising was allowed only in 1967. This helped Radio Ceylon continue its merry journey of compiling hit parades and tantalizing the film-music-hungry Indians. Finally, in 1970 Vividh Bharati started allowing recorded sponsored programmes, but Radio Ceylon had had a clear run for almost twenty years3!
Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles Page 20