After domestic success, next growth for IPL to come from international markets

In just its third year and running successfully, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has been a runaway success. However, despite the commercial success, IPL has a long way to go before it can join the ranks of EPL (English Premier League) or the Super Bowl.

But this has in no way dampened advertisers’ confidence in brand IPL as was seen in the response during the recent bidding of two new IPL teams of Pune and Kochi, which went for over Rs 3,000 crore.

This year has seen the League sign a broadcast deal for UK, wherein IPL 2010 is being broadcast exclusively on ITV, one of the oldest and largest commercial TV networks in the UK. Early this year, Google bagged exclusive online rights for IPL content for two years. Singapore-based venture capitalist Sigma Venture, jointly with their technology partner Chennai-based DCI Mobile Studios, a division of Dot Com Infoway Ltd (DCI), had acquired the global mobile application rights for IPL on an exclusive basis. Apart from online, IPL has also allotted mobile rights for SMS, MMS, 3G and IVR related services to vRock Mobile for a period of five years.

These are just a few steps taken by IPL to reach out to cricket fans globally, and while IPL has a huge domestic fan following, there is also a school of thought that believes that the real growth for IPL will come from the international market. Following the commercial success of IPL, how can it broaden its fanfare, and what are the lessons IPL can learn from EPL? The two arguably cannot be compared and some would say that cricket has a limited fan following unlike football. exchange4media finds out more on this from media planners.

What they say:

According to Himanka Das, Associate Vice President – West, Karishma Initiative, “Year on year, we participate in a global study with the Initiative WW team to measure global sports audiences, called ‘Viewertrack’. Our 55 surveyed worldwide markets provide analysis to give an unrivalled insight into international TV viewing through a truly global perspective. Considering the 2009 Viewertrack report, EPL or UEFA tournament finals fetch a total audience of 200 million TV viewers, as compared to IPL’s 2009 finals, which fetched an audience of approximately 30 million TV viewers. If you consider the soccer fan fare of nations across the globe, it is far higher than cricket playing nations. Therefore, at this point IPL cannot be compared with EPL at a global level.”

Mike Jackson, MD, MEC Access, Asia Pacific, explained, “The way the IPL has come up from scratch is a unique phenomenon. The opportunity for IPL is that it has got a huge domestic audience, it’s obviously a success and we are seeing good ratings too. We know domestically it certainly is huge, it is popular, has got huge investments and is here to stay, but the growth, I believe, will come from international markets. What would be interesting to watch out for is how IPL is marketed internationally and how they bring international audience to the game. This is where EPL has done really well, wherein they created that level of engagement. The challenge, however, is that cricket may not have the global appeal that football enjoys.”

Having a different take altogether, Mahesh Ranka, GM, Relay Worldwide India, said, “Development of sports is most important, only then will any sports tournament actually grow, especially in attracting newer audience and better players.”

Role of digital:

Das of Karishma Initiative pointed out, “New media has made the event available on the move. As per the current stats, IPL channel on YouTube has attracted around 24 million views and they are adding one million new views every day. July Systems, which has rights for IPL clips on mobile, claims that over the first 12 days of IPL over 700,000 IPL videos have been watched by users on mobile phones via mobile Internet. According to Nielsen, overall buzz about IPL in social media is almost twice as high in 2010 as compared to last year. Blogs are the most popular platform for discussing cricket, followed by message boards. Twitter is third on the list.”

MEC Access’ Jackson observed, “It would be interesting to see once the tournament is over what the data says in terms of how long people have been watching YouTube. Forward thinking rights owners need to embrace this technology. It is all about spreading the reach through digital technology. There is a need to attract kids and the youth through this technology, and if it happens, then this certainly is the right strategy for moving forward.”

While IPL3 so far has crossed over 120 million in cumulative reach as compared to the 200 million reach EPL enjoys, industry experts see no comparisons between IPL and EPL, nevertheless there is a school of thought that believes that the next growth for IPL would come from international market. Whether or not IPL can be compared to EPL at this moment, it most certainly is a success as compared to the ICC T20 World Cup.