NEW DELHI: The Pepsi brand/ad has emerged as the most
likable brand with 30 per cent respondents of a survey rooting for it during the India-Zimbabwe cricket match on 19 February, while Ravi Shastri, Tony Greig and Sanjay Manjrekar (in that order) were found to be the top three commentators with the
maximum number of respondents watching the do or die
cricket match on MAX (69 per cent).
Interestingly, amongst the cricket-related programmes on various channels ESPN-Star’s after-match analysis Follow Through was the second most-watched programme (21 per cent), after MAX’s Extraaa Innings (44.2 per cent). Similar shows on DD and also ESPN-Star’s pre-match show Taking Guard had low viewership of below 10 per cent and 13.4 per cent, respectively,
according to an online research on World Cup advertising carried out by the Bangalore-based Cross-Tab.

Cross-Tab, which carried out the survey for the India-Zimbabwe match amongst 551 respondents spread over eight cities, claims the rationale behind the survey was to gauge things like recall value of an ad, how they fare vis-?-vis competition, the likeability
factor of an ad or a brand and the reasons for it and whether the brand advertised get associated with the event, that is cricket.

“To give advertisers/media planners some effective tool by which they’ll know the effectiveness of advertising on the World Cup,” is how Cross-Tab explains the reason for carrying out the survey. The partner portals for the survey included criclive.com,
cricnext.com, and megamaal.com.

But if MAX is thinking it has been able to woo women who are housewives as viewers, they have something to think about. A gender break-up of the viewer profile for the said survey showed that only 12 per cent constituted housewives, while the majority (39 per cent) of viewership was made up of students.

While 19.9 per cent of people fell under the executive (middle level) category, 11.4 per cent would be categorised as executive (junior level). More importantly, 90 per cent of the viewership, as per the survey, constituted males.

The Mandiras, Mariahs and the Sandhyas, holding forth on ways to do surfing, cricket culinary and reporting on the sight and sounds of Africa, seem to have brought in male viewers by the hordes, apart from the hard core cricket enthusiast.

Is that why a fairly large percentage of people polled switched to ESPN to watch the likes of Sunil Gavaskar, Harsha Bhogle and Navjot Singh Sidhu analyse the match, bored with Charu Sharma’s (placed at No. 13 in the Top Commentators List) repetitive `your thought on the issue’ line and inadequacy to analyse the finer points of cricket?

Maximum viewership also came for the India-Zimbabwe match between 6-9 pm where an hourly breakup shows that eyeballs ranged between 84 and 96 per cent.

Pepsi leads the way for likeablity of an ad/brand (30 per cent), followed by the likes of Coke’s Chota Coke ad (21.1 per cent), reliance India Mobile (9.4 per cent), Pepsi Blue (5.4 per cent) and Bajaj Pulsar (4.9 per cent).

Official sponsors’ ads like that of Hero Honda and LG do not fare well on the likeability barometer. Hero Honda Ambition ad clocked just 0.4 per cent, while LG’s CDMA mobile phone campaign also had the backing of just 0.4 per cent respondents.