By ASHWIN PINTO
Indiantelevision.com Team

(16 June 2009 2:00 pm)

MUMBAI: With India’s early exit from the Twenty20 World Cup in the Super Eight stage, advertisers will obviously not get the big bang they were expecting.

ESPN Star Sports, the official broadcaster for the T20 World Cup, however, has cushioned itself by selling almost all its inventory ahead of the event. Software India MD RC Venkateish had told Indiantelevision.com that only1-2 per cent of the inventory was remaining.

According to Indiantelevision.com estimates, ESS was to get around Rs 1.7 billion of advertising revenue.

“With India out of the tournament, the ratings are sure to fall. It remains to be seen how much of a revenue impact it is going to have on the broadcaster,” says a media analyst.

Venkateish, however, maintains that there is no conditionality clause in the contracts with advertisers. “The non India matches have also fared reasonably. While there will be a dip in the Finals compared with the last time, it will not be much," he says.

Reliance Communications, a presenting sponsor of Star Cricket's broadcast of the event, feels that there will be a fall in viewership, but the ratings would still be good from the semi-finals stage. Says Reliance Communications group head - branding and marketing Sanjay Behl, “We do not expect the fall in viewership to be so disastrous as to make us regret the investments that we have made.”

Reliance is looking at the association with ESS from a long term perspective. “Last time when India won, the value that we got was far more than what we had paid for. In the long term these things balance out and we are confident that it will be positive for us. Our contract with the ICC runs till 2015. Anyway our contract with ESPN Star Sports for this event is based upon the overall visibility that we get and not conditioned on India reaching the Finals. When the event gets over, we will sit down with them and see how our brand benefited. If we did not get what had been agreed upon in terms of visibility, then we will see what adjustments can be done. After all we both need to work together in the long term”.

As an ICC partner Reliance also gets the first rights of refusal to the Champions Trophy that takes place later this year. Behl, though, concedes that the value added services that it was hoping to use this event as a launching pad would get affected in terms of uptake. “There will be a sizeable impact on the intensity here. However our interactive initiatives like contests have not been affected as we used them in the lead up to this event and during the first 10 days. We are taking around 400 people to England. Some of our customers are already in England,” he says.

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