There’s something terribly wrong with the world of marketing in India today – especially in the marketing of brands in the start-up economy.

The IPL is, for all practical purposes, funded by start-ups, dominant as they are in the list of sponsors. The domination can be seen in each and every ad break.

And that’s the point of this post.

The majority of the ads are terrible. A few are okay. None is brilliant.

You, dear reader, could argue that I’m wrong; that your view is different.

Perhaps. And the future will prove one of us correct.

A couple of years ago, we, at ZeeMelt, commissioned this painting:

Hidden in this painting are freeze frames from 44 ads. These are not the ‘best’ ads; most of these ads have not been entered in award shows and few have won awards.

However, there is something in each of these 44 ads that catches the attention of the viewer and that causes the viewer to watch the ads again and again without getting irritated.

These ads entered popular culture.

What does this mean?

It means that these ads will be discussed. They will be shared on WhatsApp and social media. Some of them will find bits and bobs from the ads actually entering our daily language and vocabulary.

It means that the budget on media could be slashed as consumers do the job of media – amplify the message using social media.

It means that the RoI on the entire campaign improves dramatically.

It means that the majority of those marketers who have invested in advertising time on the IPL haven’t done the mathematics on the creative + media, but have done so on only the media.

On the surface of it, there is great temptation to spend all the available time and energy on media, which, in the case of the IPL buy, could be as much as 50-100x the cost of the creative.

But what these marketers are missing is the fact that the consumer will do little or nothing to help the communication. He or she will not talk about average communication or bad communication.

He or she will not share the creative on Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram.

All the heavy lifting will have to be done by media spends. And that gets you only paid media – and no earned media.

Look at the painting with the 44 ads again. You will spot ads that are still shared today on social media – even if they originally aired 40 years ago.

That’s earned media.

None of the ads airing during the IPL will feature in a new version of the painting done by someone 10 years from today.

Because none will enter popular culture.

Because the marketers found it more important to spend all their time on the media spend, leaving themselves little time to work on the creative. And the little time they spent seems to have been spent on ‘mandatory’ elements rather than on consumer insights or big ideas on engaging creativity.

And the creative is what the consumer cares about.

To paraphrase a line from an ad that did, indeed, find its way into popular culture and consequently into the painting, “What a useless idea, Sirjee, to focus only on media and not on the big idea.”