MUMBAI: Did Indian TV sports channels, streamers and brands miss out on a great branding and monetisation opportunity last week during India’s monumental victory at the 45th Chess Olympiad 2024?
Some such as former sports broadcaster and an ardent chess player Harish Thawani think so. Said he on linkedin: “Nothing in the history of Indian sports/games achievement will come close to this. Indian women and men BOTH win gold at the 45th FIDE Chess Olympiad 2024. Corporate India slept on associating with this opportunity, whether out of indifference to chess or because of advisors that are only cricket focused, I can’t say.”
Agreed Essar chief digital officer Vinod Sivaram Krishnan: “Cliff hangers of boards, accompanied by the right production values and expert commentary would have ensured that the edge-of-the-seat action could be converted into a significant marketing opportunity.”
According to Thawani, 10 per cent of the global population play chess – that is about 700 million. “India has an estimated 85 million people that play chess. That’s more people than any other sport in India except cricket. So, there is an audience, it just is not being addressed,” he pointed out on linkedin.
He could well be right as according to online analytics, chess.com’s second largest traffic comes from India, accounting for some 15.4 million users. Then chessbaseIndia, chess.com and gothamchess have 1.92 million, 2.05 million subs, 5.43 million active subs respectively on youtube.
Krishnan revealed that, like millions of others, he was glued to the matches online and on Youtube. But he added that “the poor quality of coverage of the event in the mainstream media was underwhelming. I realized that the opportunity was very significant.”
Thawani explained that the feat by both the men and the women chess players as a team was “staggering, unbelievable, a mind-bending accomplishment. To win both golds with almost 200nations participating. It’s akin to a country winning the 100/200 meters and marathon in both men’s and women’s at Olympics. Anyone who has played competitive chess even at local level will tell you that this was impossible. Until today.”
Echoing many a sports broadcasting acquisition executive, who complain of low viewership for any sports apart from cricket LabIndia Instruments regional sales manager Seshu Ramakrishnan Suri said: “Chess is not an audience sport and unless one knows the game they cannot enjoy. If it is not a mass sport why will a corporate get involved as they look at reward coming out of it.”
To this Thawani had a sharp reply: “..audience size is not the only reason to sponsor a sport/game – quality of audience, level of involvement, national pride, brand values synergy (remember IBM and Intel’s involvement with chess?) and more.”
Krishnan highlighted that chess has legs as seen in the current generation of chess players who displayed “fearless play from all 10 of them in the face of the best that the world has to offer meant that the result was just the icing on the cake. Knowing that there are several other strong players waiting in the wings for each one playing today gives the same feeling of bench strength that one gets in cricket. It was so heartening to see our young stalwarts take on veterans without a shred of nervousness!”
But all is not lost as former sports broadcast executive Deep Drona said on linkedin: “It’s time to broaden the chatter beyond the popular or most obvious in the space of sports.”
Are the sports streamers, broadcasters and brands listening?
Will they rise and put their might behind chess as they have done with kabaddi and football?
(For the uninitiated, India’s men and women’s chess teams consisting of Gukesh Dommaraju – more commonly known as Gukesh D , Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi and Harika Dronavalli, Vaishali Rameshbabu, Divya Deshmukh, Vantika Agrawal, and Tania Sachdev won the gold each in the men’s and women’s event respectively. Gukesh, Erigaisi, Deshmukh and Agrawal bagged individual gold medals on their respective boards.)
