IPL on TV drives massive uplift in footfalls, search share, app installs & usage: Experts

Over 800 million viewers tuned into television to watch live sports on TV in 2023, as per BARC. Cricket led the way, amassing over 700 million viewers as both IPL 2023 and Cricket World Cup 2023 reached out to over half a billion audiences in each event. Live sports continues to reinvent television for brands, delivering across the sales funnel instantly and at scale. At the e4m India Brand Conclave, Rathi Gangappa, Chief Executive Officer - India, Starcom and Vikas Saxena, Co-founder – Sync Media shared valuable insights on the role of TV in growing brands in India:

On the ability of IPL on TV to deliver for brands across business goals:

Rathi: The kind of brands coming on board today are very different than the traditional ones we've seen, as new-age brands have jumped onto the IPL TV bandwagon to leapfrog their businesses. There's a host of objectives that can be satisfied, it's not just about the upper funnel and impact. When you've probably saturated the digital audiences, you can come to Cricket for the mass reach. But cricket also delivers last-mile objectives, like increasing footfall, and a spike in the share of search, app downloads, and installs, we've seen it for clients like PharmEasy and Lenskart. It's not just about driving mass reach, we do have metrics that prove IPL delivers across the board".

Vikas: An in-depth analysis we conducted on the impact of IPL advertising on both TV and digital for an E-Commerce brand in 2023 showed that 85% improvement in the brand’s business KPIs were attribute to the television association and 15% to the digital association. Beyond elevating search shares, TV advertising enhances the overall performance of digital media, evidenced by higher click-through rates during TV expenditure periods. One of our FinTech clients did cricket last year, and their search share not just increased during the league but continued upwards and shifted the baseline. TV on Cricket is the cheapest way to increase key KPIs.

Leading new-age brands that have catapulted their businesses in India over the years have grown on the back of IPL TV associations in the last 4-5 years. CRED, Swiggy, Lenskart, Phonepe, Car Dekho, Rapido, Zomato, Happilo, Meesho, Atomberg among others have been some of the big IPL advertisers on TV.

How brands standout through IPL associations on TV

Rathi: IPL on TV offers a plethora of innovative, customizable solutions for brands to leverage. One can go with the various brand solutions but the strive should be how to use it more effectively and contextually. Brands can promote their offerings through features, customized brand integrations, AR/VR innovations and more. We were exploring how we can do something different for one of our clients – Lenskart. We contextually used the fall of wicket, and we linked it to weak eyesight and why you need glasses, and then promoted it with AR testing. It worked really well for the brand.

On TV being highly measurable for business KPI attribution

Vikas: TV is measurable like Digital today. We used to think the KPI of the advertiser would show up in sales a few months down the line... But at this point, it is directly measurable with the 'search share'. Consumers watch it on TV and then search about it on mobile phones, visit brand websites, download their apps and buy products. We have analyzed a few thousand campaigns across categories, and search share in the brand's category is the highest co-related metric impacting future market share of a brand. If TV is seven to eight times cheaper compared to Digital, Cricket on TV is one of the best ways to expedite your journey. That's why you see the new-age companies gaining the search share faster.

With the massive growth in TV viewership on IPL, especially the growth in young and affluent audiences, the canvas is larger than ever and new-age brands have an unmissable opportunity to leapfrog their business in a short duration.