On the streets of Madras in sweaty southern India a ‘gundu’ is slang for a lie. In the common lingo of the gutter mafia who habituate chai shops and swindle for a living, a gundu is not a No. 1 fraud (that’s a chatri) but it’s enough to make you feel screwed.
A gundu is exactly what the International Cricket Council (ICC) is accused of circulating in the weeks running up to the Cricket World Cup, in an alleged attempt to derail the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
The latter was entangled in a controversy over certain Indian cricket players who had entered into product endorsement agreements with their own sponsors not the official world cup sponsors and partners. The ICC and the BCCI fought a bitter battle over conflicting contractual and players’ image rights.
The ICC claimed that the Participating Nations Agreeement (PNA) signed by all 14 competing nations, including India, bound players not to engage in ‘ambush’ marketing whereby non-official sponsors would get airtime simply by being seen on shirts, bats and hats. At least three top Indian players including champion batsman Sachin Tendulkar had signed rewarding personal commercial contracts with the likes of Samsung.
Meanwhile, LG Electronics was one of the global partners of the world cup organizers (along with Pepsi). The implications were devastating, legally and financially. The official sponsors could sue for breach of contract or even pull the plug. So much money, prestige and media exposure are involved in modern sportainment that commercial empires could stand or fall on the effective policing of sponsorships.
But who was ambushing whom? In the view of many Indians, the ICC was guilty of sheer treachery because, they said, it had not drawn attention to key parts of the fine print. After the national boards had all confirmed their participation, India felt ambushed by the ambush marketing clause.
This was no gundu in the bundu. According to former Sunday Times sports editor Rodney Hartman, who left his deadline job in 2001 to work 15-hour weight-trimming days as communications director for the Cricket World Cup, the wrangle constituted a potentially crippling threat to the biggest sports project in SA history.
The Indian team made it into the finals against Australia. Imagine the impact of a no-show by India had they been forced to pull out; or worse, how the global event itself could have suffered had India fielded essentially their Second XI those without sponsorships.
It came at a time that sponsorships of all kinds are under the spotlight due to the growing phenomenon of ambush marketing. How can sponsors prevent their carefully laid plans for maximum media exposure from being waylaid by cunning competitors who sneak their branding into the visuals of the event?
Seek to promote Pepsi by keeping rival cans out, and someone pops a Coke right in front of the camera’s beady eye. (This seemingly led to a little roughing up of one spectator at one of the cricket grounds, an incident that may have constitutional ramifications if it finds its way to the highest court in the land).
Ambush marketing worries broadcasters as much as corporate sponsors and event managements. Sponsorship is a three-way street a thoroughfare far more uncontrolled than the multi-lane highway of advertising, where all advertisers share the common carrier of the media provided they pay the toll.
Like any three-way relationship, sponsorship is fraught with risks. In attempting to restrict sponsor exposure to what has been agreed beforehand, corporates usually try to tie up both the event sponsorship itself and the media sponsorship that goes with it. The former covers player travel, facilities, organization and so on; while the latter ensures that the chosen media turn a blind eye to competing branding or would if they could.
“The best combination is obviously when an event sponsor buys the broadcast sponsorship too, so that the brand has double the impact and so that there is no chance of any ambush marketing,” says Sooz MacKenzie, sponsorship director for MNet Supersport. “Vodacom does this very effectively in rugby: Vodacom Super 12 and Vodacom Trinations. ABSA does this effectively with the ABSA Currie Cup, as does Pick ‘n Pay with the Cape Argus Pick ‘n Pay Cycle Tour, to name but a few.”
According to BMI Sport Info, which compiles figures on what is spent and received in SA sponsorships every year, corporations in 2002 paid R1.49 billion in direct spending on sponsorship events of all kinds (not just sports). Leveraged advertising amounted to a further R1.24 billion. This was up 19 percent from 2001 at a time when adspend as a whole grew by only 2 percent (more than offset by 11 percent media inflation) according to AC Nielsen’s AdEx.
“Not all companies will publish what they spend on sponsorships as they also withhold quite a lot of other strategic information,” says James Monteith, director of BMI SponsorWatch. He is nevertheless confident in the figures he provides. “We do get a substantial amount of information from corporate sponsors as well as sporting bodies which is privileged information, and we merely use this information to determine the size of the market, and therefore have a good idea on what the size of the market is.”
Talk in marketing circles is that corporates are sensitive to what their clients might say about throwing away money on sport, and also fearful of what the unions might make of it, given the retrenchments by corporates. Monteith comments: “We do not believe that sponsors are throwing money away on sponsorships as our measurements continually show that sponsorships are very successful and that sponsorship is an integral part of the marketing and communications mix.”
All the more reason, then, to build trust with the mighty public. The thread that ties sponsors, media and sports bodies together is of course their mutual relationship with the public or ‘publics’ as PRs like to call the great diversified mass of fans for soccer, rugby, cricket, tennis, athletics, boxing, wrestling, swimming and snooker again, to name but the most important few.
“The stronger the bond in the relationship, the greater the power of the brand,” says Sooz Mackenzie. “Discovery is the sponsor of soccer on Supersport, targeting both the black and white market segments: their markets. Vodacom are the broadcast sponsor of boxing on Supersport, targeting the black market specifically. The white market is covered through their sponsorship of rugby.”
Surprisingly, dancing comes in as the third most popular ‘sport’ amongst all adults (see graphic 1), reflecting the passion for ballroom dancing
that has taken the townships by storm in the past decade. Amongst
males-only dancing is down at No 7 though still significant (predictably,
maybe, it is No 2 with all women).
PASSIONATE as the public is for games of all kinds, sport isn’t everything. Want to know what the most ‘popular’ monthly activity is amongst those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale? According to AMPS 2000B it is ‘attending a funeral’ (64.1 percent) followed by religious observances in churches, synagogues, temples and mosques (52.2 percent). The Aids pandemic and traditional values drive behaviour today, perhaps in ways that sports sponsors have scarcely begun to understand and relate to. As the base of the social pyramid broadens, with a growing preponderance of the relatively poor (and a widening of the gap with the rich), the fact is that sports sponsorships tend to favour the upmarket segments where the disposable income is.
Not only that, but TV and its backers may cease to care about the common middle-class man. “The ordinary spectator, supporter or TV viewer will soon inevitably be forced into having to buy pay-TV for a regular sporting fix,” says former Sports Editor of the Sunday Tribune and twice SA Sportswriter of the Year, Darrell Thomson, who in retirement watches all TV sports channels religiously.
Locking value into pay channels has happened already with Super 12 Rugby. Showman millionaire and wheeler-dealer Louis Luyt took rugby into a decade-long deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation which only appears in South Africa on MNet/DSTV. Thomson feels the trend is probably unstoppable because it is driven by media and sponsor self-interest, so that eventually all major events will take place behind cable TV turnstiles.
“On a different tack,” Thomson goes on, “the biggest gripe regarding SA TV coverage of major sports events right now notably rugby, cricket, soccer is that with two or three exceptions the standard of knowledgable, articulate and entertaining commentating is well below par. The majority are merely praise singers and apologists for the establishment of those sports.”
Thomson is the first to concede that TV coverage in sports-mad South Africa is of an exceptionally high standard, comparable with the best overall qualities of coverage in first world nations such as Britain and Australia. The selection of the sports and technical delivery provided by both the national broadcaster and pay-TV are superb, he says. So what did the Cricket World Cup do for TV ratings, for the quality of coverage, and for reaching the common man? Statistics assembled by James Monteith of BMI Sports Info show a TV audience rating of 10 percent of all white, Coloured and Indian adults watching the final between Oz and India, with a rating of 4.2 for black adults.
These are remarkable ratings, and good news for the public broadcaster which can use them to stave off the claims of pay-TV. Even more interesting is the fact that the India-Kenya game pulled a rating of 6 (according to the TAMS measurement by the SA Advertising Research Foundation). Non Western countries playing cricket against each other still drew strong audiences a sign, it seems, that South Africans of all races were rooting for the continent. And this is despite our own early departure from the scene.
Still, an average TV rating of 8.6 for the cricket final on a Sunday is ten points below what the soapie, Generations, drew on a Monday: 18.5. Only gangsters, family intrigues and fictional characters can attract that kind of viewing. Come to think of it, why didn’t SABC3 ambush its audience with a good cricket gundu?