View from Pakistan: Selling manjan between overs

Karachi: Last month when the Pakistan cricket team beat India in a thriller during an Asia Cup game, social media sites exploded with thousands of Pakistanis rejoicing, spouting all kinds of praises for the team. Then, on the same sites, within a matter of minutes, the euphoria of the victory was replaced with collective anger over the way the state-owned sports channel (PTV Sports) had been telecasting the matches.

Not only were a million mind-numbing, repetitive TV commercials punctuating the gaps between overs, by the time the channel used to cut back to live action, deliveries were being missed, action-replays had come and gone, and at times, a wicket had already fallen, making the channel revert to blasting the viewers with another maddening bout of ads.

It was an extremely disorienting experience. What’s more, even when the channel did decide to stay on the field, the screen would contract (from below) and actually shrink to make way for what are called “banner ads”, while on the top left of the screen logos or product shots of one sponsor or another would emerge, blinking like a cheap, irregular tube-light.

If you thought that you would be able to survive the chaotic, greedy corporate onslaught on display on PTV Sports by switching to the second main TV channel that was airing the matches in Pakistan (Ten Sports), you’d be wrong.

Though based in Dubai and expected to exhibit a little more sense and marketing ethics than a Pakistani channel, the telecast on Ten Sports was even worse! Knowing that nothing whatsoever called “consumer/viewer rights” exists in Pakistan, Ten Sports too went on a psychotic ads spree, showing exactly the same million commercials that were running on PTV Sports between overs (sometimes even between deliveries within the overs). The Ten Sports screen would often shrink and contract even more drastically to accommodate the dreaded banner ads or whatever the heck they are called.

Many Pakistanis decided to directly complain to PTV’s new managing director, Mohammed Malick, on Twitter about the madness and he promised that he would make sure better sense prevailed during the T20 World Cup.

Nothing of the sort happened. PTV Sports and Ten Sports are at it again, and there is just no escape from the cringing madness that attacks every last bit of sanity and intelligence left in a viewer whose cable operator conveniently blocks all other channels that are also showing the matches.

All major cable operators are required to block these channels and only make available those channels that are running Pakistani ads. But it is believed that some Indian channels too are no better in this respect.

However, as most Pakistani viewers would tell you, two things make watching a cricket game more bearable on an Indian channel. First of all (compared to their Pakistani counterparts), Indian channels run fewer ads between overs and only rarely attack the screen during play with gaudy, silly banner ads.

Secondly (and more importantly), a majority of Indian commercials are a lot more watchable than the Pakistani ones.
Then there is also the example of sports channels like South Africa’s SuperSports. SuperSports hardly ever runs any ads between overs. I’ve never understood how it makes money, but it must be doing well because it has grown and now has six more channels, if not more.

But the greedy, careless and chaotic approach towards sponsorship of PTV Sports (or Ten Sports) is not the sole problem here. What magnifies the misery is the quality of the ads as well. Often during the games in which Pakistan is not doing so well, a majority of viewers develop an extremely negative perception of the products and services whose ads repeatedly bombard their senses.

The channels don’t care, but shouldn’t the sponsors and their advertising agencies? All kinds of surveys and marketing research takes place in companies and agencies, so why not do some research on this? Why not go out there to determine exactly what a consumer thinks of an ad or ads played over and over and over again during a match the Pakistan team was doing badly in or during a game that was delicately poised?

But coming back to comparative content, Indian commercials are at least watchable. They use clever insights on human behaviour to draw in the viewer, use some humour to keep the viewer’s interest intact, and then slip in what they are actually trying to sell. It works. Pakistani commercials on the other hand are still stuck in some time-warp, although I’m not quite sure which era that warp leads to. Thus I will go on to state that in actuality they are wedged in some weird parallel universe!

Apart from the few that have used humour to good effect (UFone), a majority of the ads revolve around two main formulaic categories.

First category includes ads in which shiny, smiley and happy people are jumping and dancing just for the heck of it. You can slip in any damn soft-drink, cooking oil, mobile phone, tea, chips, paan masala (etc., etc.) product amidst all the deranged jumping and dancing, because such pointless nonsense is not associated with any one particular corporate brand. So exactly how does one’s advertised brand stand out in the dandy, jumpy clutter? Add to this meaningless mix, words like “Jazba” (will), “Khushiyaan” (happiness), “Enjoy”, “Fun”, “Masti (naughtiness)… you get the picture. Now imagine having to watch this surreal claptrap during a tense game of cricket.

The second category includes epic and entirely pretentious ads with hefty and poetic Urdu words about patriotism and progress, with images of farmers (sweaty but smiley), school kids (usually running in slow-motion with Pakistani flags), moms dancing in kitchens around frying pans and microwave ovens, dads impressing all and sundry at the office, grandmas sitting on prayer mats, soldiers marching, birds chirping, babies giggling, skies pouring, sun shining, people embracing, people laughing, all because of a great mobile-phone connection that they have, or the right milk that they drink, or because they were able to get an apartment in a spacious housing scheme…

In Pakistan, many ads are still being based on sweeping, pleasing, generalised and largely rhetorical meta-narratives and platitudes; or worse, many also revolve around worldviews that most certainly are not of this Earth.

Ads that work well on both commercial as well as creative levels are usually based on some psychological and emotional insights most people (or the target audience) can immediately relate to. Glorified renditions of a guy selling manjan on a bus just don’t cut it.