New Delhi: As Team India find themselves in a do-or-die situation at the cricket World Cup, it's not only the Indian cricket fan who is getting a sinking feeling.
The people most distraught due to the situation is the corporate India, for whom over 40 per cent of the Rs 12,000-crore branding money rides on the Indian cricket team.
India are up for a survival battle at the Cup following their debacle against the lowly Bangladesh in the campaign opener on Saturday.
The Men in Blue now must win Monday's match against Bermuda as well as the Friday encounter against Sri Lanka in order to make it to the Super-Eight stage.
While Monday's match looks comparatively easy unless the team decides to throw away everything, it's the group match against Sri Lanka, which has turned into a virtual semi-final for the team as the Lankans seem to be good form and spirit in the event so far as against an insipid Indian start.
Even in the event of India winning both the matches, everything may still go down to the wire and some complex mathematics may see the Indians take a flight home even before the Super-Eight stage begins.
The prospect of Team India's early exit from the Cup is now giving the jitters to sponsors and endorsers of brands, restaurants and pub owners; who have already been counting the cost of this abject failure.
Many big brands like Samsung, LG, Cinemax and Coca-Cola have invested heavily on the Team India brand.
According to industry estimates, India’s failure to qualify for the Super-Eight stage would mean a drop of up to Rs 150 crore in advertising revenue for the broadcaster.
The total on-air advertising revenue for the Cup is currently projected at Rs 400 crore.
The Indian broadcaster for the World Cup was charging between Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 3.5 lakh for a 10-second slot in matches involving India in the Super-Eight stage. It may be forced to cut it down to Rs 1 lakh if India fail to qualify.
Ad rates for non-India matches, too, are expected to drop if the Men in Blue crash out at the league stage. Currently, the rates are Rs 1.25-1 .30 lakh for matches not featuring India. This may drop to Rs 1 lakh or even less in the event of an early exit
Much of commercial sponsorship in this World Cup is linked to the assumption that top teams like India and Pakistan would progress smoothly to the Super-Eight stage with the guarantee that the advertisers will be able to exploit six juicy matches at the least.
But that was not to be. Pakistan's early departure has already been a commercial calamity for many.
The possibility that India may join them on flights back home could be a still bigger and unmitigated disaster. It will mean a huge loss even for the International Cricket Council.
For ICC, what is at stake is not just the millions of rupees that might have been wasted, but the willingness of sponsors to gamble again for the World Cup in 2011.
The ICC is already busy selling its wares for the next tournament — wares that will look pretty shoddy if they can't deliver Indian participation throughout.
Soon after the World Cup schedule was announced more than a year ago, there were whispers that the International Cricket Council had created the schedule in such a way as to ensure that the main teams of the subcontinent — India and Pakistan — are not knocked out early.
The overblown World Cup schedule is supposed to be deliberately one-sided between the seeds and the minnows and it was designed in such a way that in a normal situation the first proper knockout match will not take place until the final week.
This would ensure that the top teams would play in no fewer than nine matches, which could be exploited by sponsors, advertisers and the media.
Comments
0 comment