Thursday, June 05, 2008

Brand IPL on the Blogsphere

Perfectly timed, hogging the prime hours of the Indian summer, IPL gave us more than one reason to stay glued to our television sets. This one sporting event has taken cricket as a game to a whole new frenzy. Cricket enthusiasts have become fanatics, and the cricket fanatics, well the less said the better. Even the grumpy grandfather, who crinkled his nose for crippling the game from the glorious matches straddling over days to a mere 20 overs joke, is smiling in approval. He is also secretly envious of the multitude of opportunities young cricketing talents have today. And with Bollywood showing generous amounts of interest, we as marketers will only be too glad to put our monies on the table without batting an eyelid.

Indian Premier League managed 16, 500 posts in 45 day.

Each of the 8 teams chosen to play, in the past month, has managed to exhibit certain personality traits unique to the team. The teams have managed to create substantial buzz on the blogsphere. Consumer Generated Media has been voraciously following everything about IPL form the fat pay cheques to Sachin’s injury to the skimpy skirts of the cheerleaders ;), nothing is being spared.

Clearly blogs and bloggers have their own biases, and some teams have been doing the rounds far more than others.



Despite not qualifying for the semis, Knight Riders managed to rake in maximum number of posts in the blogsphere. Is it the SRK Magic or Kolkatta's ardent support for their team?

Rajasthan Royals, the winner and the least expensive team of the tournament,
got noticed by blogs towards the last leg of the tournament. Fianlly their Stellar performance got noticed!
I made a few observations, some scary, some surprising and some just bowled me over

- A team’s performance alone is not enough for them to tide the blogsphere.
- Although ‘Eat cricket. Sleep cricket. Drink cricket’ still holds true, Bollywood continues to remain the unbeatable baap of entertainment
- An individual gets far more recognition than a team as a whole
- Particular incidents picked up by media, like SRK smoking or spending too much time with his team or Vijay Mallya firing Chaaru Sharma, can spike the trend chart.

The flamboyant Mallya and the bollywood king SRK have made bigger dents on the blogsphere than the shrewd Amabani

- IPL ads have also contributed to certain amount of noise on the blogsphere.

IPL or no IPL cricket will always be a favourite topic on blog. But this one event has created a lot of gossip value for the sport. Even non-cricket bloggers like me are blogging about it. From an extravagant opening ceremony to Bajji allegedly slapping Sreeshant, blogs and bloggers have been reveling in all the juicy details.

Do i need to elaborate this :)

A lot of brands are piggybacking on the noise IPL has managed to stir. It has positive influence on readership and viewership. Media has put the 45 day event on the front page and prime time of news channels. What’s more, it has decided to stay put there for the entire course of summer alluring readers and viewers. Despite all the degraded voyeurism, the sponsors are thrilled, as they are getting more than their monies worth.


Who is the popular Captain?

Thanks to Bollywood, IPL was executed in a rather filmy style full of action, drama, masala, and yeah we did manage to catch a glimpse of good cricket somewhere along the way. Without Bollywood’s fervent support the cricketing fraternity alone wouldn’t have managed to pull off a 45 days fanfare.

12 comments:

Karthik Sriram said...

Wow!! Your analysis read almost like Captain VijayKanth!!!! Just Kidding.. But on a serious note, even a team which has lots of anti-people will have blogposts right? As much as popularity might be a reason for more blogposts, I think Kolkatta Knight Riderss large no of blogposts is also bcoz of many ppl (like me) who do not like them!


LKS

Dhivya said...

@ Karthik

captain vijaykanth is not flattering :) anyway I agree with you when you say all the posts need not be positive. we all know negative buzz spreads faster! also I was only talking about the noise the teams are creating on the blogsphere and not going into if it was positive or negative

Unknown said...

WOAH!!!

you just reminded me of my dissertation.. (come to think of it, even then i hadn't done sooo much analysis.

But the most important question still remains unanswered... What should all the IPL fans do now in the evenings?

Karthik Sriram said...

Yeah, personally I liked Rajasthan Royals as they didn't have any "Star" endorsing them. I was particularly pissed with Chennai and Kolkatta for projecting 2 useless people - namely, SRK and Vijay - as the team faces... At least SRK owned the franchise... But this non-bathing, non-shaving is downright horrible.

Anyways, I loved the finals and other than that, many of the IPL matches were a drag!

Lastly, nice to see your blog updated after a long time!



LKS

David Wen said...

I love your blog name.

The Ranch finally has a user-friendly URL. Would you mind updating The Ranch url to http://theranchblog.com?

Much thanks.

Anonymous said...

Interesting analysis. However, I would like to ask a few points -

1) Did you troll (write a program) through all webpages with terms like 'IPL', 'Knight Riders' etc and come up with these figures? And hence, can you breakdown the figures into blogposts vs comments?
2) Can you arrive at a breakdown of this noise by different blog providers like blogger,wordpress etc?
3) And hence, along with the data you have and armed with these two questions, can we arrive at certain strategies (and pricepoints) to monetize this noise?

btw..added u on twitter!

duende said...

igor! bring your club quickly man. i've found another 'lettered' one.

Anil P said...

Long time.

Anonymous said...

stumbled upon your blog by chance,liked your 'about me'.
hope to see more interesting stuff from you

Satish Bhat said...

This is some gr8 analysis! Did u write this program urself? Really neat work.

Boby Thomas said...

Fantastic

Abhilash said...

hey, thats a really nice post. well, i think its too late now to comment. but, well, i just wanted to know if you kinda like writing on cricket or ipl or anything like that?

well, it could be anything like this interesting analysis or a funny article.

I have a cricket blog, a new one, (you know it better than me that the ipl 2009 mite have more blogs) and would like to have more writers. I dont have regular writers, would like to have many.

so, i would like to know if you could write some articles ? well, you could be the Guest Blogger or something if you dont have time for regular writing :)

can you do that? :)