Two news items caught my fancy last fortnight.
One was a meme on some brand spending $14 million for two, yes just two ads during Super Bowl 58 in the US. That’s Rs117 odd crore at today’s exchange rates.
The other was an RTI reply by Food Corporation of India that around Rs 13 crore were spent on printing the Prime Minister’s photo on bags meant for food rations in the state of Rajasthan alone. Multiply that same amount by the number of states under the current ruling political party and you get the math.
The first one is an entirely private affair and probably the best demonstration of hyper-decadent capitalism at play. Every year, brands across categories vie for the right spot to buy for the sheer eyeballs one gets on the one single occasion which can also pass off as the official ‘couch potato day’.
Madhvi Mavadiya of Finextra wrote a wonderful piece dissecting the madness that takes over all brand managers with every Super Bowl. You can read it at Super Bowl 2024: The fintech firms that spent $7 million on a 30 second ad (finextra.com).
We too have our marketing media madness every year but it does not last for just one day. It goes on for 50 odd days. The IPL. Another example of gross display of marketing muscle. And it just keeps growing, year after year, as the broadcaster and organiser justify the stratospherical ad rates by the rise in viewership. In 2023 it increased by 30% over the previous year on television alone with another 15-odd % on pay-TV. In an interview, the head of ad-sales of the broadcaster mentioned that the CPM on IPL was the lowest at just Rs 50-60 per CPM. In 2023, the total ad revenues were a whopping Rs 10,000 crore while the fantasy sports platforms earned Rs 2800 crore. In plain speak, we gambled away Rs 2800 crore in two months under the garb of “team building skills” and nobody really raises an eyebrow!
The broadcaster and the organiser will always justify to the potential advertiser that the RoI is the highest. They will justify the Rs 20 lakh per 10 seconds of advertising saying that the teams earn and the players earn and all the money goes into developing the sport and getting the best of the world to converge for this festival of sport.
Cross your heart and ask yourself whether all this can really be justified. If the ESG regulators get down to their audits in all sincerity, will they not question such spends? All advertisers, in unison, sing out loud that their business gets positively impacted by advertising on IPL but has someone really audited and measured? If it were true, why would some of the key advertisers flounder in their business?
Brands need to do some serious soul-searching on the way money is spent on advertising as all of it is passed on to the consumer in some way or other. A hedonistic institution cannot be propped up actually fleecing millions of gullible content junkies under the justification of freedom of choice and expression.
The day some hard-nosed auditing is done of the spends against returns and the famous “50% that is wasted” is identified, many brand managers and marketing heads will roll. This is a cohort of people scratching each other’s backs to keep living the high life of a money-spinning capitalist enterprise under the garb of sporting excellence accessing 500+ million viewers in a country where 800 million are poor enough to get free rations from the government every year.
Which brings me to the money wasted on printing photos of political leaders and sticking them up in any vacant space available. I once had the opportunity to ask a minister as to why did he want his face on posters of a government scheme. He was candid enough in saying that he wanted as much visibility and recall as possible… at government expense! Hence every minister uses the resources of one’s own ministry to propagate oneself, in complete contravention to the norms of governance.
While one can still excuse a little known politician for using tax-payer resources to build awareness and recall, what really justifies the top leadership that everybody in the country recognises by a mile or a mere spoken word? To me, it is the incessant habit of loving to see one’s own face everywhere. Across all politicians, unless the party diktat forbids you as in case of the Left Front. Every measure of governance, from an airport for the rich to free rations for the poor is seen as yet another opportunity not to be missed, at the tax-payer’s expense.
As students of economics, we had learnt that “money is a matter of functions four – a measure, a medium, a standard and a store. Somewhere, the function of “morality” has to come in. Academicians and activists together have to bring about this change in the definition of money. The moral compass has to be integral to evaluating how the money is being spent and how it is performing against parameters of ethical and sustainable use. The recent Supreme Court judgment on Electoral Bonds is one strong step in that direction. If all the money from that source of funding is blocked from usage in the elections to happen, it will be a litmus test of “moral money”.
Talking of which, there is a “Moral Money Summit” being planned in Europe in the month of May with the primary objective of giving naked capitalism some decent clothes. We need a similar initiative in our country at the earliest.
