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Soft drinks spark hard battles in Independence Cup

When soft-drinks giant Pepsi signed a multi-million sponsorship deal with the Board of Control for Cricket in India regarding sponsorship of the upcoming four-nation quadrangular one day tournament celebrating 50 years of Indian Independence, it did so with strings attached.

Those strings are now in danger of tripping up the BCCI, as it battles to solve a piquant problem created by the fact that Pakistan, one of the four teams in the contest, is sponsored by rival soft-drinks giant Coca Cola.

The Pepsi deal specifically postulates that no competing product may be advertised either on the clothing and equipment of the players, nor by means of in-stadia advertising. However, the Coca Cola sponsorship of Pakistan's cricket team is conditional to the players sporting the logo on their clothing during any and all international cricket fixtures.

"There is a bit of an administrative problem, which we are now sorting out," says that master of the laconic understatement, BCCI secretary Jagmohan Dalmiya.

The Pakistan Cricket Board on its own initiative suggested that it would ask its players to not sport the Coca Cola logo on their clothes - but insisted that in such an event, its players should be compensated for the resulting loss of revenue. Dalmiya, according to sources, is now busily attempting to sell this solution to Pepsi, and ask it to sponsor the Pakistan players for this tournament alone. Failing this, Dalmiya says, an attempt will be made to get the team sponsored by some other firm.

However, this is merely one part of the problem - and by no means the most irksome.

The fun really begins on May 21, when Pakistan lands in Chennai to play its round-robin game against India at the M A Chidambaram Stadium. Coca Cola has already signed an agreement with the host Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, whereby it will pay an annual sum in return for prominently positioned advertising hoardings within the stadium for domestic and international fixtures.

However, a Coca Cola ad in the stadium for the game in question conflicts with the Pepsi sponsorship deal. And neither of the soft-drinks behemoths is in the mood to give an inch. Pepsi insists on sticking to its contract, which bans in-stadia advertising of any rival during the course of the tournament. And Coca Cola is equally insistent that if the game is to be played at the MAC, its own hoardings should dominate the arena.

Coca Cola's intransigence on the issue stems from the fiasco of the Wills World Cup 1996. On that occasion, Coca Cola had shelled out an enormous amount for the privilege of marketing itself as the "official" soft drink of the tournament. Pepsi, in an advertising coup, hit back with a series of peppy ads featuring World Cup stars mouthing the tagline: "Pepsi - nothing official about it!"

While Coca Cola's "official" status went unnoticed amidst a welter of "official" shoes, "official" chewing gum and "official" just about everything else, the Pepsi tagline took on the dimensions of a national slogan.

Now Coca Cola sees its best chance to avenge itself for that humiliation - and indications are that it will settle for nothing less than the pound of proverbial flesh.

The search for a solution to the impasse has, thus far, yielded one formula - namely, that for this game alone, no Coca Cola hoardings be displayed within the stadium, in keeping with the Pepsi contract; and that at the same time, the TNCA name one of its stands the Coca Cola Stand, to satisfy its sponsors.

The proposed formula is bang in line with that flippant definition which says that "A compromise is a solution that satisfies neither party in a dispute, yet leaves both parties thinking that the other one has lost."

However, neither Pepsi nor Coca Cola have, thus far, shown any signs of accepting the offered compromise.

"We will arrive at a solution well before May 21," is all that Dalmiya, for his part, will venture by way of comment.

It will, of course, be interesting to see if the solution, as and when it comes, addresses the larger problem - that of proliferating sponsorship deals. With more and more companies eager to hop aboard the cricketing bandwagon, state boards have been signing their own deals without reference to the central body - and, as a result, creating a situation where conflicts of interest similar to the Pepsi-Coke imbroglio could crop up with increasing regularity.