Going digital has helped Delhi Capitals increase revenue and fan base: Vinod Bisht
Bisht, interim CEO of Delhi Capitals, talks about how the IPL franchise doubled its revenues over the last 2 years, its growth plans and the road ahead
Jointly owned by the GMR Group and the JSW Group, Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Delhi Capitals has doubled its revenue over the past two seasons, according to interim CEO Vinod Bisht. The franchise has around 26 sponsors on board for IPL season 15.
In a conversation with e4m, Bisht said, “The past two years have actually been an eye-opener for us as we had to reinvent ourselves as a franchise. As the spectators could not be there in the stadium last year, we got an opportunity to establish new digital partnerships and create (audience engagement) content like never before. So, these past two years have been extremely fruitful for us and we have nearly doubled our revenues.”
Bisht added that a lot of new-age digital brands have joined the franchise as sponsors. “IPL is an irresistible platform and every two-three years, we see a new set of companies joining the league. We are seeing a number of educational brands, fintech and EV players joining us. We are happy to forge relationships with new brands.”
Bisht further shared that focusing on digital has helped the franchise not just revenue-wise but also in increasing its fan base. “We decided to connect with the audience where they are present; be it in their homes or their offices. So, we have now made our policy of doing any activation or media activity as digital-first, and then taking it to other platforms. It has also helped us in reaching people who are living far and wide around the world, in different time zones. This has helped us in creating new markets for us.”
Talking about the growing popularity of Delhi Capitals, Bisht said that the franchise currently has a fan base of 22 million across various social media platforms and this is expected to grow significantly in the coming days. “We do a lot of activations in our home city Delhi to keep the fans engaged. This time too, we will be taking the DC activations to colleges, etc, to people who can’t get to the stadiums to watch the matches. We are planning to get more aggressive on this front. Additionally, we are quite active on social media. In fact, last year, we were amongst the top three sports franchises internationally when it came to the number of social media posts made in a year. We posted more than 11,700 posts.”
He added that along with match-related content during the IPL, the franchise is very active on social media too. “We are connected with a lot of humanitarian groups as well that work on empowerment or supporting the underprivileged. This keeps our engagement going beyond IPL too.”
The franchise is also curating a good content stream with nicely packaged behind-the-scenes videos to details on team practice sessions to keep the audience engaged and drive monetisation beyond sponsorships.
However, despite such strong digital footing and activations, the franchise revenue structure remains skewed towards the central sponsorship pool. Bisht quipped, “Not to say that we are not generating local revenue but there are a lot of challenges to it, for example, IP rights protections for merchandise etc. But we are hopeful that this will change as the central government will come out with new regulations around digital assets and currencies. NFTs etc will definitely open up new revenue streams.”
