- Introduction
- IPL, Pandemic and Advertising Expenditure
- What value the IPL brings to digital marketing
- Why does digital marketing benefit from the Indian Premier League?
- 5 examples of brands that profited from IPL
- Conclusion
Introduction
What’s the one thing besides the players that is most common during the IPL (Indian Premier League) season?
Owners? Glamour quotient?
Well, the answer to this question is advertisements.
From the billboards, players’ jerseys, stumps, or your emails bulldozed with discounted F&B coupons… IPL digital marketing is one of the most successful platforms.
IPL 2021 has begun. Hopefully, the staggering digital marketing industry of the country will see potential growth after a long slump that the COVID-19 has brought about.
IPL, pandemic and Advertising Expenditure
Sam Balsara, an advertising and media veteran, in an interview shared some insights that threw a much better picture on the advertising expenditure during the IPL season.
| Year | AdEx |
| 2015 | Rs 1200 crores |
| 2020 | Rs 2700 crores |
Even though the first pandemic wave hit last year, an additional Rs 300 crores to Rs 2700 crores in Advertising Expense (AdEx) was spent during the lockdown to drive revenue and growth for major brands.
What does this mean?
This is the value that IPL brings to the marketing industry. The mutually beneficial relationship between the marketing industry and the IPL has flourished since the beginning; however, with the boom in digital marketing, the industry has only profited much more.
Let’s understand why digital marketing benefits from the IPL
- The three-hour format is attractive to all age groups and audience types,
- The match-slotting hours on weekdays from 8 PM-11 PM (now from 7:30 PM onwards) and double-headers on weekends make IPL a sporting event worth time and money.
- The emotional investment of fans with the tournament. The greater this association with cricket, the more the reason to support and buy a brand the tournament/ a team supports.
- Commercial sponsorships economically help lesser-known players and cricket associations with the necessary financial infrastructure and resources to play.
- Product placement during IPL season using various digital marketing hacks on TV, social media, and other modes of communication profits every single time.
- During the IPL, brand placement on social media or in collaboration with a cricketer( and its promotion on social platforms) has also given the much-needed audience exposure to multiple brands and their products.
Now that we’ve understood the reasons why digital marketing benefits from IPL, let’s take a look at five brands that successfully leveraged digital marketing during IPL to maximize profits.
Brands that use digital marketing during IPL
1. Dream 11
Dream 11 became the title sponsor of IPL 2020 after Chinese company Vivo stepped down as the official IPL partner due to tense India-China relations last year.
As a result of this collaboration, the fantasy league brand surpassed 100 million registered users during the tournament, Special thanks to IPL’s dedicated audience and Dream 11’s ads in regional languages( on Star Sports, Disney+Hotstar) and digital marketing campaigns on social media.
In the past too, the company launched very successful integrated marketing campaigns like ‘Ye Game Hai Mahaan’, of which the ‘Game Night’ campaign was wholly influencer-centric.
On social media too, the promotion of post-match felicitation ceremonies for winners during the IPL brings a lot of audience engagement with the brand.
“As online fantasy sports is entirely based on live sporting events, it was a good opportunity for us to be visible at different fan touchpoints. Pitch report, toss, giving the ‘Dream11 GameChanger of the Match’ to the cricketer with the most fantasy sports points and so on were some richly organic moments where fans connected and interacted with our brand.” – Vikrant Mudaliar, chief marketing officer, Dream Sports & Dream11
He also added that during the tournament, the company catered to more than 80 million requests per minute.
Fact: IPL prediction using Machine learning– The use of machine learning for predictive modeling of IPL cricket matches can provide accurate predictions for the outcomes of games. In particular, a support vector machine can be used to learn a model from past data that can identify the key patterns and relationships between features that lead to a particular outcome. This learned model can then be used to make predictions on future games, based on the current values of the features.
2. MPL – Mobile Esports Platform
Although many digital marketing stalwarts have now distanced themselves from the IPL, calling it an overcrowded Kumbh* of brands, others continue to reap the benefits from this profitable partnership.
MPL sponsored KKR( Kolkata Knight Riders) and RCB( Royal Challengers Bangalore) and signed Virat Kohli as its brand ambassador last season.
As a result, the company witnessed a surge in the overall user base and other parameters. In fact, IPL has proven to be so beneficial for MPL that it’s SVP, growth, and marketing, Abhishek Madahavan said:
“If I had Rs 500 crore to spend in a year, I’d rather spend it on the 50 days of IPL rather than throughout the year because the amount of viewership it’s able to generate is huge for anyone looking to build a brand.”
MPL focuses both on mobile marketing and TV marketing during the IPL season. During this IPL season, its brand campaign on ad films based on old-Hindi sayings is performing well on all platforms. On social media, the campaign led to an all-time high fan frenzy with memes and video templates circulating and garnering much audience engagement and brand awareness.
In fact, MPL capitalizes massively during the IPL through its huge follower base on social media with daily, weekly, and monthly contests and activities. Meme contests from the ‘HainAkalKheloMPL’ campaign are one prime example.
Note: You can conduct your own analysis and forecast the results of team matches using IPL datasets.
3. CRED
Not just brands related to sports, but far removed sectors like fintech and electronics profit from digital marketing campaigns all through the IPL season.
Cred, last season’s official IPL partner, saw 2.4 million new customers during the two months of the IPL, a Forbes report estimated. Their niche ads featuring Madhuri Dixit, Bappi Lahiri, Govinda, and Udit Narayan set new creative benchmarks for advertising agencies: the perfect branding/marketing of a fintech brand with creative talent.
In May 2021, when IPL’s new season began, Cred rolled out its Mega Jackpot Week campaign with hampers including iPhones, free flights for the next five years, and Bitcoin to top it all. This campaign generated a lot of buzz on digital and social media platforms generating huge user engagement scores and numerous downloads on mobile devices.
Likewise, Cred’s Power Play campaign during the ongoing IPL is a supremely well-played digital marketing move that has made the brand even more popular. The concept: stand a chance to win 100% cashback on a bill payment during the powerplay overs of the IPL.
4. Muthoot Fincorp
Muthoot launched its product placement digital marketing campaign during the IPL 2020 season as a first-time IPL endorser of RCB. This Kerala-based fin corp ventured into the Northern and Eastern Indian market with a launch of its 4500 odd-branches coinciding with the IPL marketing/ brand promotions.
It also rolled out interest-free gold loans during the IPL to gain traction during the tournament.
All this led the company to witness a 54% rise in brand awareness and consideration. Close to 140 million digital impressions and 20 lakh inquiries at their call centers and branches during and post-IPL led to incredible growth for the company that saw an enormous decline in business during the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown.
Muthoot’s social media campaign of #SpiritofGold also was an audience engagement move that benefited the brand. Besides, the CSK Gold Coins available on Amazon, Flipkart and the company’s website was also a new digital marketing move that widened the reach of Muthoot’s customer base.
Having said that, the company continues to focus on conventional marketing strategies because of its pan-India popularity and reach.
5. Niine- Menstrual Hygiene Brand
As the principal sponsor of Rajasthan Royals since September 2020, Niine, a three-year-old company, first did only a logo placement on the back of players’ jerseys last year.
But, its digital marketing campaigns around menstrual hygiene led to a positive breakthrough for the company’s business.
Take a look at how Rajasthan Royals announced their partnership with Niine on Twitter.
Even though RR happened to be at the lowest spot on the table, Niine’s business grew. It gained a 3% pan-India market share. Within two months of IPL, the company recorded sanitary napkin sales worth Rs 20 crores as opposed to Rs 14 crores in the first three years of operation.
Conclusion
So, the numbers are all here to prove how these brands successfully deployed digital marketing to get maximum ROI during IPL seasons. But, it’s always a two-way street for all partnerships/relationships that wish to flourish.
Do you think if CRED had not done their advertising right, they would have managed to profit from the IPL, even if the entire world’s population saw cricket? No.
Digital marketing, if and when done right, can change the fate of any brand. Therefore, to learn the right marketing skills, one has to upskill with the right course. Check out Post Graduation Courses in Digital Marketing. The course is specifically designed for working professionals who want to match and contribute to the needs of the digital marketing industry.
