| MUMBAI: This afternoon the National Sports Seminar was held
by the The Sports Journalist Federation of India. The speakers included
Fed Cup coach Enrico Piperno, BCCI executive secretary Ratnakar Shetty, Ogilvy
& Mather chairman Piyush Pandey and Tam Media CEO L V Krishnan.
Krishnan looked at how
coverage of sports in the newspapers influences television viewership. "Sania
Mirza needs to thank two people - her coach and journalists. The coverage on her
has been fantastic. When she played Serena Williams at the Australian Open recently
it made front page news. Ratings soared in Andhra Pradesh and Hyderabad. "Newspapers
educate sports fans on a topic. They are then motivated to go to the television
to watch the happenings. A recent event that benefitted in a big way from newspaper
coverage was the football World Cup. In 2002 when the event was on the Indian
cricket team was playing England at the same time. Cricket won comfortably then.
"This time there was a 300 per cent jump in the viewership of the
soccer World Cup. That is because of the huge newspaper coverage. There was 450,000
cms worth of print coverage which was more than what was seen during the 2003
cricket World Cup. For the common man, media is a seamless medium. They read about
a sports event in the newspaper and then they gravitate towards the television.
"At the same time you need a personality that captures the public's
imagination. Hockey has suffered in this respect. There is no one dominant personality
who can give the sport a push as far as visibility is concerned. Soccer on the
other hand is filled with famous names. Their pictures in the newspapers create
a lot of recognition even in the smaller towns." He also spoke about the
effectiveness on advertising in sport. After all it is the one genre where in
product placement blends in seamlessly. An example was Pepsi getting involved
with a cricket series a couple of years ago. They branded the boundary rope with
triangles. It worked well because the camera focus on the boundary rope was high.
Replays also helped visibility. "By comparison if a character in a soap is
shown drinking a Cola it looks out of place and disrupts the flow of the story." Pandey
noted that in India there are two great advertising vehicles Bollywod and sports
(mostly cricket). the advantage that a sportsperson has is that he/she is a great
body of character. "There is performance which kids aspire for and parents
appreciate. There is the power of youth and also physical activity. Unfortunately
in India, there is laziness both on the part of the agency and on the part of
the sportsperson. "They do not sit together. If they did, then the
scriptwriter would get a clear idea of what it is the sportsperson can and cannot
do. Because there is lack of dialogue you get ads that ridicule a sports person.
The Sehwag Ki Ma ads made a great batsman look like a fool. I can also think of
just two ads where Sachin Tendulkar's appeal was used well. One was the Pepsi
mask ad. here the fact that he likes kids came through. Also Pepsi wisely did
not let him speak," said Pandey. He noted that a lot of great ads use
sportspeople in a natural environment. An example is Sampras and Aggasi playing
tennis for a Nike ad. At least the company is not using Sampras to sell diapers.
It is upto the sportsdperson to also be selective of the kind of creative he/she
appears in. Otherwise his/her brand value can go down. Shetty spoke about
the different ways the BCCI is using money. One way is increasing the pay for
domestic cricketers. This enables someone to look at cricket as a career even
if he is not in the national side. The BCCI also gives pensions to retired cricketers.
It is also looking to give women's cricket a push. Then there is the stadium
upgrade project. He admitted that the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai needs a facelift
if it is to host matches during the 2011 matches. The BCCI will reimburse the
various cricket associations upto Rs. 250 million on their renovating or building
stadiums. The BCCI is also looking to create a corpus fund to help other sports.
He added that the BCCI is going to inaugurate its head office at the Wankhede
stadium in October. It is also looking to build a musuem where visitors can look
at artifacts. | 
