In race for eyeballs, marketers losing sight of their consumers

NOW that cricket has caused such anguish among millions of Indian fans, and painful post-mortems are underway regarding the Indian team’s miserable performance, it may be the opportune moment to raise the question: why advertisers behave so un-sportingly. Why must the price they extract for allowing me to indulge in my passion for the game by watching it on TV be so high as to destroy the pleasure of doing so to a substantial extent? I appreciate that the advertisers spend all that money in the hope of selling their brands to me. But why do they think that the best way of doing that is to drive me crazy by playing intrusively, the usually unintelligent and unaesthetic ad over and over again, anything between 20 and 30 times during the course of a single day’s play? What is the assumption they are making about how the human mind works? Who has told them that the more they repeat the message the more likely I am to remember it, like their brand and buy it? Don’t they realise that I am not an inert, passive involuntary receiver of advertising message? That my brain is a clever machine, which shuts off to protect itself from unwanted nagging? That after having processed some message, it pays no further attention to it in subsequent repeated exposures, so that it can keep itself awake and alert only for new stimuli in the environment? That, is its survival mechanism. And not only do the advertisers repeat their message ad nauseam, they do it so rudely and intrusively. Before the action connected with the last ball of an over gets completed, the commentator’s voice is rudely cut off in mid-sentence and the unending sequence of ads intrude. By the time we go back to the game, the first ball of the next over is often bowled, thereby reducing the over to a 4-ball affair for the viewer. We are never allowed to soak in the emotions on the field when a wicket falls, or see “live” the drama connected with the event, because at that very instant we must be rudely interrupted, and instructed, for the millionth time, about the soft drink that will make me a super hero, or the magical car that will go round the world on a drop of petrol or the mobile phone that acts like the pied piper’s flute for all the pretty girls around. I will have to wait for the replay to catch what I missed “live”. Can anything be more irritating than the intrusion of a silly brand slogan in the radio commentary every time a boundary is hit? When I am immersed in the exaltation or frustration of the passage of play of the moment, that is not the time to talk to me about soft drinks or two-wheelers or mobile phones or whatever. Why do they disturb me when I least want them to? Why do they spend all that money to win my friendship and end up, instead, by generating an enormous pool of irritation in me? What lies behind this maddening state of affairs? It is a witches’ brew of greed and myth, each feeding on the other. The greed is that of the media and channel owners. In order to squeeze the last drop of advertising revenue, they exploit the naiveté of the advertising community and perpetuate the myth that the large viewership of cricket matches means a large captive horde of zombielike consumers inertly waiting to be “reached’ and mesmerised into buying a whole range of products and services through the simple technique of repeated advertising “hits”. The media and channel owners tempt the advertisers with estimates of the large number of “eyeballs” staring at the TV screen during a match, and the media buyers in the advertising companies promptly get to work with their new numerology to translate the number of ad repetitions they will buy into the number of advertising punches they will score. TRPs, GRPs and OTSs make up the currency of transaction in this mythological world. Not realising that the ability of these magic-like numbers, to reflect the real effectiveness of advertising expenditure in the real world populated by real people like you and me is no better than that of Monopoly money in reflecting the real wealth of the players, the advertisers fall over themselves to pay substantial sums of real money to the media owners to buy a slice of advertising slots. Now, the channel owners must try to nurture this ideal state of affairs. This they do by creating as much hype about cricket as possible. Exploiting the chronic inferiority complex of Indians and the history of one or two rare successes of its cricket team in the international arena, they burden the game into becoming something more than a mere game, — the nation’s icon of national prestige. The more the hype, the more the jingoism, the more the TRPs, GRPs, OTSs, the more the scramble among advertisers to buy ad time, and less the cricket that viewers get to see. What a virtuous cycle! After the debacle in the Caribbean, everybody is undertaking a reality check about the real skills of the Indian team. I earnestly request the advertising community to do a similar reality check about the real effectiveness of their advertising expenditures linked to cricket. To do that, they need to understand how the human mind works, how we process information. They need to be humble and borrow from the enormous wisdom about this lying within the academia of psychology, cognitive sciences and neurosciences. They will find there nothing that justifies their profligate advertising behaviour. They will realise that those eyeballs they are chasing are blind to their ads. At the very least, they should introspect and examine their own reactions as normal human beings when bombarded with unwanted messages. But reality checks can be dangerous. If the advertisers realise that all the money that they have spent on cricket has mostly flown down the drain, they will stop doing so. At the end of it all, I may not be able to see any cricket on TV, not even the 4-balls-per-over version. Is that a blessing in disguise? Perhaps. (The author runs a marketing strategy consultancy, Market Modellers in Singapore)

Courtesy: EconomicTimes