'Content has assisted in the reinvention of sports'

The inaugural edition of e4m-GroupM Let’s Play: Sports marketing summit was organised in Delhi on January 18, 2023. Some of the big names from the fraternity had shared their views on the topic “Sports streaming becomes mainstream”.

The panellists comprised Abhijit Shah, SVP – Marketing, ICICI Prudential MF; Manav Sethi, Head – Martech and Growth, Vida Hero MotoCorp; Utsav Malhotra, COO, Noise; Damyant Singh Khanoria, CMO, Oppo India and Ashish Pherwani, Partner – Media and Entertainment, Ernst & Young. The session was chaired by Amin Lakhani, CEO, of Mindshare, South Asia.

Lakhani opened the session by briefing about the topic and then requested Pherwani to shed some light on the opportunity of sports streaming in India. To this, he said: “Sports has 3-4 buckets and each of them follows a very different trajectory from each other. You start with a main bucket which is premium cricket like ICC and IPL. Here you are talking about 150 million or thereabouts of reach on streaming which is huge by any standard. Given that, now the key properties are starting to go free, I don’t think in the future that 150 could cross 250 million. I feel there is a whole bunch of niche sports that actually make no sense on TV but work very well on digital. Recently, there is a very interesting case study around how Chess is becoming more and more of an e-sport and getting a huge fan following. I still feel there is a big demand for smaller niche sports and they will be a community, transaction buying products or getting coaching. So, how we see sports has to be broken on little buckets. It’s not only cricket, but there is also a lot more and that is going to get a lot of lot more.”

Speaking about how from an ICICI perspective, he has seen the journey of streaming opportunity, Shah stated: “Here we are talking about fans at a different level. Audiences who understand games and sports are probably multitasking when it comes to streaming something or consuming data. We are very clear that if you want to bet on sports, you have got to calendarise it. You cannot just go and do one campaign and feel good about it. You need to keep on investing in it, make it like a sports calendar and keep on tracking it.”

“Gone are the days when you will chase only the impressions. Earlier you would chase content to bring context. I think that is also flipping now. You will get content coming out of the context as well and that is what, as a marketer, we all should look up to. Content has assisted in the reinvention of sports, not only the brands, and brought in commerce along with it,” Sethi commented.

Malhotra agreed with what Sethi conveyed and added, “We are all obsessed with creating differentiated content but if you don’t have the right target audience, it is not going to land. With mediocre or not-so-brilliant content but brilliant concurrence for that same audience is likely to yield a much higher efficacy. For brands, consistency is the key. It is not about just one sport that the nation obsesses over, but with the calendar you have got so much happening whereby the fundamental nature of the fan profile of each of these sports, you can do hyper-targeting to get to that audience.”

Concluding the session Khanoria said that he wants to experiment with the impact that the regional languages have had on sports streaming. That is something which has blown up in a big way. “Just the emergence of language sports broadcasting is taken off in a big way. It is getting replicated by tons of streaming brands. From a marketing standpoint, whitewashing India with one campaign that works for everyone, is probably something that one needs to question, probe and poke a little bit more,” he said.