The importance of being India

I walked into office yesterday morning knowing fully well that we'd have to change the media schedule of a campaign due to India's brilliant performance in the WT20. Our campaign schedule was drawn up on the reasonable assumption that India would come second in its group, beating Afghanistan and losing to South Africa and thus, occupying position C2. However, India or rather the Indian cricket team decided to delight this cricket crazy nation by winning both matches.

How does this affect an advertising campaign you might ask? Well you see, the schedule for the inter-group matches had been drawn based on the above mentioned reasonable assumption. As a result the team C2 would play it's next three matches (the Super Eight round) in prime time according to IST. However, we thought India coming first in Group C meant that not only will the dates of its matches change but also a shift in the timing of the matches from prime time to later in the night (as per the schedule for team C1). Which in turn meant that we could run our campaign without cricket stealing viewer-ship from other programs in the prime time.

So the morning began, with a flurry of phone calls, to channels, to clients and Star cricket and many others. Changes in schedules, reallocation of spots and many other complicated maneuvers were being considered to ensure that our campaign didn't clash with the matches. Until... a representative from ESPN-Star Sports informed us that the match schedule  had been structure to not change  irrespective of whether India came first or second in Group C; that it would still occupy position C2. After all, how can India play in the anything but prime time when more than 80% of any cricketing event's revenue comes from the Indian sub continent?

Ah... the sigh of relief at the emancipation from a few hours of torturous number juggling and millions of phone calls. And yes, a shake of my head in wonderment at the importance of being India in the world of Cricket.