Sports marketing in cricket has taken a dynamic turn—from traditional static billboards to players and umpires becoming moving advertisement spaces. This story humorously explores how marketing meets cricket in surprising ways.

 In  a lavish  board room of a Seven  Star hotel, Rajdeep Sardesai was perplexed to see Harsha Bhogle and Ramachandra Guha already sitting there. Rajdeep thought Roger Binny, the BCCI  chair,  had invited him for an important interview. But he found out that Harsha  the commentator and Ramachandra  Guha ,the historian, were also invited for the meeting that was set to start in about fifteen minutes. Right then the secretary Durvaas came and informed the group that Roger wanted to pick their brains on a very important issue relating to sponsors and rule changes.   A top-notch consultant was expected to  be there to give a  presentation and Roger would like to seek their inputs on the same.  All three ‘Roger’ed that in unison.

Twiddling their thumbs waiting for the  arrival of the consultant, Harsha broached the topic of quick Sri Lanka bundling off in the recent match. Reminiscing about the test match days, ,Rajdeep recalled how the whole village near Goa was glued to the radio when his dad made an epic 217 in the first test in the West Indies series with the support of tail enders Solkar and Prasanna.  Harsha interjected saying times had changed and reminded how Sunny was booed for carrying the bat all the sixty overs  in the inaugural World Cup  match scoring just 36 runs. Ramchandra was nostalgic about the days of maiden Nadkarni and the dead and defensive bat of Manjurekar that gave Pasupathy Vijaya Ananda Gajapathi Raju (Vizzy) enormous time before the next run was scored, to talk about historic facts about  Ranjith Singhji  and anecdotes of Lala’s temper including but not limited to his  rumoured  hitting  of the umpire . 

As they were waiting, the secretary came in and handed over a brief bio of the consultant Srini Srinivasan and quipped with a smirk that the consultant had acquired the expertise  necessary  in a cosmic osmosis way. It appeared while he was residing in a dormitory, his room was between marketing guru late Ashoke Bijapurkar and Operations Research expert late Venkalathur Natesan Ramesh and was just above that of late T.Madhavan, the statistical  expert. In his dream Srini had downloaded the special model developed in heaven by the three experts when they were watching the famous Sakunthalam.

Perplexed by what the secretary said, Harsha ,Rajdeep and Ramachandra wondered aloud whether they were in a wrong room  as they all had seen a very big poster for a Vedic Science Conference with a key note from one SriSriSriSriSriSwamy!

AS they were about to pull in the secretary to check, they saw an old man  in a thin frame jumped in with a lot of energy. “Hello I am Srini Srini like the pizza pizza. I know your backgrounds. Being a management and media people, you will  understand easily than Roger. You do know he  is frozen in 1983 when he took maximum wickets and  he keeps watching the movie 83, that many times a month. Let me get to the point quickly” started SriSrini.  “I  prefer you reserve the questions to the end” he quipped. Without further ado he  started on his presentation.

“ I am here to present some revolutionary ideas to enhance sports marketing. Look, you all have seen billboards, watching and admiring the  Amul and Air India ads while travelling through the streets of Mumbai”. 

The concept then was the board was stationery and the target audience was moving.

In our customary head stand yoga morning where we learnt to think upside down, our team members found the fundamental change that has happened. We see each cricketer as a billboard carrying advertisement for ten or so products. This implies now the bill board is moving and the TV audience that are watching are stationary.

Take a breath we are in the world of moving- bill boards and stationary audience. 

Let me remind you at this point that  this is a proprietary axiom and  you are prevented to talk about this by the non-disclosure agreement you had signed. Of course I got that by osmosis too. ,Thank you. Let me continue.

This implies the need for a whole set of new metrics for advertisement effectiveness. I am not going to bore you with our process that uses multi-criteria  data analytics based media planning and programming model. But let me give you some broad conceptual strokes.

Moving bill board and stationary audience is simply the dual of the stationary billboard and moving audience problem and Harsha, you must have learnt from  Mote, Malya and Saha how to obtain the shadow price using duality theorem.

We in our firm take Shadow price concept to a new level and have come up with some recommendations from the sponsors. For example the sponsors want more number of overs to be allocated mandatorily to spin bowlers and less to the fast bowlers.  

When a  bowler runs fast the moving billboard gets too blurred  In the follow through  due to the momentum the bowler stoops too much and a good amount of shadow is created.

As a result   the logos in the front part are getting covered and the back part getting crooked and thus  reducing the effectiveness. Further more the batsman lifting the bat to protect covers a large area of the relatively stationary batsman billboard. 

Substitute this with a spinner. With an elegant dancing movement the spinner can display  the logos very well. The batsman not  in a hurry may even take a step or two forward making it easier for audience to focus on his jersey.

The second significant finding is based on the existence of stationary billboard and moving eyeballs. If we shift our attention to the fans in the field then their eyeball movements are akin to moving audience in the traditional advertisement model. The stationary billboard is the hitherto unexploited vast ground. The ground space should be allocated to sponsors. Say for example  the offside is painted with  say Tatas, masala, onside with  Patanjali, behind the wicket MTR and the like.This is a vast untapped area of revenue. Commentator can be given special training and future commentaries may look like -taken on the half volley driven into the Tata Masala for four runs.

=Kneeled down and swept the ball behind the MTR field for four runs and the like.

And Harsha you can help in this regard. 

The third key element that we have found observing the recent matches-India’s second innings in Australia and similar occasions we found that there is a quantum jump in the exposure per hour metric for the umpire’s index finger. In the olden days the umpire used to raise his finger perhaps ten times over ten hours giving an exposure index of 1. Oh Rajdeep, if some one played like your dad did in the first test in West Indies  the index will be a fraction. But ,as we see lately these days ,if the innings get bundled in half an hour the index will have a value of 20. That is a quantum jump. 

The umpire’s glove is another unused surface for advertising. A glove with a glowing index finger will be thought of to enhance the visibility to audience. For broadcasting the newly invented picosecond exposure capture camera can be used. I am sure Rajdeep  you must have heard of it in the media circles. These new cameras are based on the same principle of Arundhati viewing techniques prescribe in our ancient scriptures. Added to this if we make the umpire’s coat pocket in a specialized transparent material we could capture his index finger while  it is stationary.” Excited Sri Srini looked  unstoppable. 

Right around that time the secretary Durvas appeared at the doorstep to inform that Roger could not participate due to urgent mattes and the meeting needs to be postponed.

Looking for some scoop , the  participants asked what was the pressing issue .Reluctantly Durvas indicated  that it was an IPL naming issue now that the country was moving towards Bharat.

‘The domain name BPL is taken by the British Physical laboratories and ignoring them and using it could land up in different kind of IPL-Intellectual Property Litigation.” Continued  the secretary’” And we cannot call it Premier League of Bharat because PLB is taken by the Premier League of Baseball India.” We are caught between the British and the Americans” sighed Ramachadra Guha. “It is not a British company any more” interjected Harsha. 

“Yes” said Rajdeep .” “ But it is a Nambiar group company  from Kerala and given what we did to Sashi Tharoor it is unlikely they would cooperate.” ’ The secretary  also mused about  another problem . It appeared that the  women’s league was    wondering whether they should be called Bharathi . The government of  the Tamilnadu  was threatening that would tantamount to cultural appropriation of their iconic poet Bharathi . Perturbed by these interruptions  Srini asked whether he should continue, to which Durvas said ‘ Forget it’.In frustration  Srini threw out the password protected jump drive that had the model and the findings.

Lo and behold!  That very moment the three experts in heaven watching Shakunthala heard the Durvas rishi giving a curse that Dushyant would forget Shakunthala  . Through cosmic osmosis, Srini Srini transferred the curse to the participants so that they would not remember the paradigm changing findings. The participants realizing they could not remember the great cutting edge axioms on billboard asked  Srini to give the pp slides.

He  replied to them ‘This is the cusrse of Durvas. And the pps have vanished. Only he can provide a  remedy. I have thrown out the jump drive . May be if you bring back the jump drive  and the promised million dollar cheque ,  I may remember the password and you can get the notes. Till then go fishing with a real net and not in the internet. I will be waiting.”

As Srini Srini came out of the room, the TV in the lobby was showing a cricket match and there was a loud “How’s That?” . And there it was,  a glowing index finger with a logo Srini Srini! 

Srini

PS

With the start of the IPL season Sri Srini consultants found out that the umpire as a billboard has a lot more potential than initially thought of. In a time motion study of a match several different hand movements were observed in regular frequency. That included:

Hands lifted and crossed  gesture to announce the start of the match, end of power play, strategic time out ,substitution and the like;

Hands lifted up in a surrender gesture for sixes;

Horizontally waving hand with fingers doing elegant dance for fours; and

Close to chest crossed hands indicating wrong decisions in a review.

And as umpires stay relatively in the same spot during the over they provide the unique moving and stationary bill  board space and new models of exposure can be developed using sophisticated algorithms. The basic version of the  model had been developed to make use of a traffic constable as an advertisement medium. With the prolific use of automated traffic lights, the original model was shelved. With sufficient modifications the umpire movement algorithm has been developed.

Stay tuned for the next meeting with the BCC

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