The suspension of IPL and idea of decency
Another fortress fell this week. The Indian Premier League (IPL), having dodged all kinds of curve balls and leapt over numerous hurdles in its decade-and-a-half of existence, finally stumbled to an abrupt halt, midway into its 14th season.
The “bio-security bubble”, as the quasiairtight logistics of the event are labelled, gave way. A number of players and staff, supposedly insulated from the grimy, pandemic-ravaged world outside, tested positive for Covid-19. The same fear and dread, which the rest have been enduring for over a year, came visiting those who dwelt in their firewalled fastness.
Commentators on television, print and digital media got busy working out the economic impact of the curtailed extravaganza — on the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the participating clubs, the small army of support staff which holds it all together, the fans and, above all, the advertisers who had backed it with thousands of crore in media spending.
How badly have the advertisers been served?
Marshall Mcluhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. Six decades on, his principal thesis, that “the medium is the message”, continues to resonate for its prescience and accuracy, and endures through all media forms.
A television advertising spot, which runs in a commercial break during an IPL fixture, is a medium (spot) in a medium (break) in a medium (fixture) in a medium (television). Unpacking the nesting is important to parse the layers at which a viewer engages with advertising.
Television is increasingly emblematic of the involuntary confinement we have been subjected to. While it attempts to inform and entertain us, it is also a constant reminder of all the other media which we have had to forsake. It is our solitary window to the world, but one with which we now have a paradoxical, “now I love it, now I don’t”, relationship.
Move up a step to the IPL tournament. Over 14 years, hundreds of millions of cricket fans across the country, and many millions overseas, have aligned themselves with the participating clubs and have developed the same sort of parochial tribes which you associate with club sport all over the world. Last year, organisers showed contextual sensitivity when they moved the venue to the United Arab Emirates. The tournament could proceed without imposing pressure on stretched support services.
This year, in contrast, with India having declared premature victory over the pandemic, the organisers got swept up in the exuberance and kept it back in India, albeit with severe curtailment in venues and nobody in the stadium stands. While the audiences tuned in, they probably nursed some resentment too. After all, here they were, being instructed to mask up, even when they were at home. And there were the young, brash, larger-than-life players, like gods among us, in their impervious bubble, so near in close-ups, so far from our trials and tribulations.
Which brings us to the commercial break. By definition, advertising is about hedonism — desire, craving and sensual gratification. Our incarceration has left us leading strangely abstinent lives. Our wardrobes full of different clothes for different occasions have surrendered before unfussy, well-worn tees, shorts and yoga pants. Make-up dries in its pots and tubes. Fancy footwear gathers dust on shoe racks. What may have tantalised in a different time, only serves to aggravate today. The yawning gulf between what we need and what we want has been bridged, on the side of what we need. In the event, anything which belongs to the realm of want, not need, is now superfluous. The string of ad spots in a break is, in lesser or greater measure, a grating reminder of our privations.
At this point, it may be redundant to examine what the smallest level of our nested hierarchy, the spot, conveys. It is, however, important that we do so, to determine what gains or losses the advertisers whose media plans were frustrated by the decision to suspend IPL may tot up.
Brands are recognised as manifestations of every aspect of the human condition. As such, they manifest, explicitly or implicitly, the joys and sorrows, anxieties and aspirations, interests and aversions, of the consumers they speak to. If they step away from the semantic space which they are expected to inhabit, they face a backlash. If they line up with what their loyal users wish from them, they are rewarded with loyalty and advocacy. All too often, the alignment may be entirely involuntary, expressed in media choices. This fraught area of communication analysis is now called “Brand Safety”.
Over 30 years ago, a small band of visionary marketing communications professionals established the Advertising Standards Council of India. They swore a solemn commitment to “Ensure Honesty, Truthfulness and Decency in Advertising”. They may not have known it then but they were, in effect, enshrining the very same idea.
How so? And why does this settle the issue of the gains/losses experienced by advertisers in the current contretemps?
Decency is the bridge which connects Mcluhan’s medium/message assertion with brand safety. At every level of our nested hierarchy, we encountered a persistent paradox. We were drawn irresistibly to what the medium wanted to share with us. And yet, it also felt like the nagging discomfort of a pebble in our sneakers. The problem with the pleasure principle, by definition, is that it is transient. Pain, conversely, is relentless, persistent.
Advertisers, unaware of the immutable law of unintended consequence, were tantalising the sensate. And infuriating the subliminal.
There will be another day to advertise and drive those throngs to your brands. Consider yourself lucky. You dodged the bullet.