By Ashoke Agarrwal
I am a student of both cricket and advertising.
The cricketing season in India starts in the post-monsoon months and nears its end in the dog days of April with the IPL. As the different hues of cricket play out this year, the parallels between cricket and advertising strike me.
Cricket is the only sport with three widely played versions – Tests, One-dayers (ODIs) and the T20s. The shorter versions – the ODIs and the T20s – are later versions of the game whose oldest form is the five-day Tests.
Let’s think of advertising agencies as the players, their client brands as the team they play for, and the advertising campaigns the agency and the brand management create as the type of cricket match.
Test matches are games of deep strategy akin to a game of chess—the results of a Test take days to unfold. A Test match might end without a winner, but with every Test, a player’s reputation is either enhanced or diminished.
An advertising campaign akin to a Test match focuses on creating a long-term positioning and equity for the brand. Therefore, the campaign’s planning horizon is over the long term, measured in years. Like in cricket, in the “Mad Men” era of advertising – stretching from the 50s to the 80s – Test-type campaigns were the norm. In the Test match era of advertising, the client’s management considered their advertising agencies as brand custodians and partners and paid them as such. As a result, advertising agencies could afford to hire intellectual and creative talent that could deliver long-term results, setting up a virtuous cycle.
In the late eighties, Wall Street replaced Madison Avenue as the valued partner of companies in the US. The phenomenon soon spread across the world. As a result, the planning horizon shrunk from years to the next quarter. And the era of the ODI began in advertising.
Client management tasked agencies with creating ODI-type campaigns to deliver sales and results reflected in the next quarter’s financials. As a result, agencies took on the role of a vendor who supplied services to specifications set by the clients. As a result, agency compensation changed to reflect the new realities, and agency talent pools shallowed.
With the digital age coming, the era of T20 in advertising dawned. Performance marketing became the new mantra, and the planning horizon shrank further from the quarter to the click of a like, share or buy button. Agencies became clickbait suppliers, and desk jockeys’ armies paid like wage earners while the platform behemoths like Facebook and Google ate everybody else’s lunch.
Like in cricket, all three forms of advertising – Tests, ODI and T20 – continue to co-exist with Test and, lately, ODIs yielding market share to T20s.
Like top-rung cricket players like Virat Kohli and Ben Stokes, who are superb at all three forms of cricket, a few super agencies play, and the brands they handle continue to create all three types of campaigns. But the preponderance of agencies and brands, driven by market realities, are becoming predominantly T20 players.
The super agencies cross-pollinate the skills and capabilities practising all three forms of advertising. Test teams, like the current English team, win Tests playing “Baz Ball”, bringing the aggression of T20 to the Test arena. Super agencies can bring speed and accountability to long-term brand-building campaigns—or strategic nous to the daily toil of performance marketing.
Over the next decade, AI is going to change many businesses. How will it change advertising? Will AI engines take over the quotidian tasks of the ODI and T20 kind of advertising? Will the business of advertising go back to being the fine art of positioning, building and nurturing brands over periods of years and decades? Will such agencies attract, once again, a new generation of brilliant strategic and creative minds?
While we ponder advertising in the age of AI, let me give you a taste of why the much-ballyhooed generative AI technology is unlikely to replace true creativity in advertising in the near future. I asked Chat GPT to provide me with a 50-word mini-essay on “Why Advertising is like Cricket”. Here is the response.
“Advertising and Cricket both require strategy, patience, and a keen eye for opportunities. In cricket, a team must carefully plan their moves, adjust to changing conditions, and seize moments of weakness in their opponents. Similarly, in advertising, a brand must develop a clear strategy, adapt to changing consumer behaviors, and capitalize on emerging trends. Both cricket and advertising also rely on effective communication and teamwork to achieve their objectives. Finally, just as cricket has its own set of rules and regulations, advertising also operates within a set of guidelines and best practices to ensure fair play and positive outcomes for all involved.”
Isn’t it as bland as can be? I suspect it would be the same answer if I replaced “Cricket” with any other team sport or “Advertising” with any other business service. Try it for yourselves. This proforma response is because the core of the current state-of-the-art generative AI bases its response on probability curves trained on static data without any actual capability to explore the context and synthesize creativity.