Sporting bodies need to start understanding the importance of content. They can start by going easy on YouTubers and content creators who use their footage in their content
Sporting bodies need to start understanding the importance of content. Image: Shuttertsock
Cricket has thrived in India so far. Not because the sport marketed itself well or anything. Instead of the BCCI or ICC, our parents and family led the indoctrination from when we were two days old. Why did this happen? The answer is very simple. There were hardly any channels while growing up in the 90s. There was nothing binge-worthy. The content wasn’t gamed to algorithms or human behaviour. So in Ravi Shastri’s words, “Cricket was the real winner.”
It was the only ‘most exciting’ thing among the other limited things on TV. It had no real competition for years. So when sport becomes family viewing, it is tough to break the chain. Families need ammo for small talk, if that supply isn’t coming from love marriages in the family, it starts coming from shared experiences like serials, movies and cricket.
Once you enter the small talk club, you don’t need marketing or content to grow the sport. This mummy-daddy marketing not only gets you viewers but gets you loyalists—the gold standard viewer. When children watch content with their parents, they also watch the reaction of parents to the content. They understand events through the perspective of their parents in their impressionable years. This is how political ideology gets passed on from generation to generation, this is also how sporting loyalty gets passed on. At least until the kids turn into adults and rebel.
But this was until the early 2010s. Things changed after that. Today, we are a multi-screen household. Children have their own screens, parents have their own screens and grandparents complain about everyone having their own screens on their Whatsapp window. Families are soon going to have fewer shared experiences with respect to content. This means fewer parents peddling their favourites on to the next generation. Suddenly, certain sports will have to start slugging it out in the free market for the attention and interest of the next generation.
To become a fan of a particular sport, you need to have context. Why is the win so important to a particular character, why is someone the hero, the villain, or the underdog? Whose story do you relate to the most? We usually invested our childhoods into gaining this context. But as we grow up, we don't have the time, or the patience to invest in a sport, gain all the context, develop a perspective and fall in love with a hero or a team, for whom you can't miss a single game. And that was until sport discovered content marketing.