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The Pro-Kabaddi League (PKL), which debuted with a bang a couple of weeks back, has managed to continue to attract viewers. The first week reach of the Anand Mahindra and Charu Sharma promoted tournament is 218 million, second only to the annual twenty-20 extravaganza Indian Premier League's reach of 420 million in the 2014 edition.
The PKL telecast on Star India’s sports channel Star Sports 2 (English feed) and its Hindi movie channel Star Gold (in Hindi), has outdone tournaments like the recently concluded FIFA World Cup (93 million), the 2013 edition of the Hero Hockey India League (62 million), Indian Badminton League 2013 (45 million) and Wimbledon 2014 (41 million). It has thus emerged as the country's second most viewed tournament this year.
Reach is a viewership metric that indicates the total number of people who have seen the tournament in a specified time period.
The acquisition of the broadcast rights to the league was part of Star India’s initiative to spawn the multi-sport culture in the country. In keeping with its strategy to provide multi-lingual feeds in India, the network decided to have the Hindi feed of the tournament on Star Gold. This served two purposes – it allowed the Hindi feed of the ongoing India-England series to be telecast as planned and gave the PKL exposure to the audience (pre-domninantly male) on Star Gold.
However, data shared by the network reveal viewership of 32 per cent of all viewers were women and 22 per cent children. The strategy of making the sport appealing to youth through its marketing and packaging seems to have paid off with 25 per cent of all viewers in the 15-24 age segment.
On an average, female viewership (as percentage of total) for sports lies in the mid-twenties. The obvious outliers are the marque sports events like FIFA World Cup and the IPL where up to 40 per cent of viewers may be women. Thanks to the PKL, Star Gold has seen a 37 per cent jump in the prime time slot reach, drawing in both males and females.
Analysts and media planners believe since reach figures are indicative of how many people have sampled the tournament, the second phase of developing the sport lies in converting the reach to comparable viewership. Viewership is the number of people who are watching a tournament at any given point in time during its telecast. It represents the persistent viewers and thus advertisers looks at both the reach and the viewership of a broadcast property before committing spends on it. It remains to be seen how the viewership metric plays out for PKL.
Uday Shankar, Star India CEO, is confident advertisers and sponsors will join the league once it proves its mettle. “We are in no hurry to monetise. We were always confident of the potential of Kabaddi, but advertisers were reluctant to pay what we considered a fair price and, hence, we decided we would rather not sell sponsorships than discount its potential value! The tournament sponsor for the first season is Star Sports,” he says.
The buzz around the tournament can also be attributed to the presence of national and local celebrities. The launch match saw the likes of the Bachchan family, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Sachin Tendulkar in attendance, and the consequent matches saw the presence of political leaders, including L K Advani, Rajeev Shukla, Prakash Javadekar in Delhi, and Shatrughan Sinha and Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi in Patna.
On social media, too, Star Sports Pro-Kabaddi conversations have crossed a billion impressions, which is an achievement of sorts for a something perceived as a rural sport and being televised for the first time.
The marketing effort for the league has also been driven by star power. In the run up to the launch of the PKL, Star network ran promos with Salman Khan in a dual promotion for his movie Kick and the tournament. Similarly, currently on air are promos featuring Ajay Devgn, who is seen promoting the league and his August 14 release Singham Returns. Star India holds the telecast rights to both the movies as part of a five-year deal with both the actors individually.
