Pro Kabaddi Season 5 on the mat soon: 12 teams expected to get 70 sponsors

Vivo on board with Rs 300 cr for 5 years; Star India looking to reap the rewards of its involvement

It has taken four seasons and three years for Star India to get a title sponsor for the country’s first ever professional league for kabaddi. But that was by design, not for lack of interest, says the broadcaster about the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) that starts its fifth season two weeks from now. The network says it has been selective about sponsors as it wanted to develop the PKL property first; and now that Vivo has signed on for Rs 300 crore for five years, the wait has paid off. But, can the sport that is bringing in the most in terms of sponsorship money after cricket, live up to the hype? 

When it was launched in 2014, kabaddi was seen as a heartland sport. Advertisers were unsure about viewer interest and broadcaster intent, but elaborate packaging, targeted marketing and rising viewership numbers have changed their minds. 

As of season four, 52 brands associated with the eight franchises participating in the league that notched up 100 million average impressions, according to Star India. This figure is expected to increase as the tournament has added four new teams to the roster, taking the number of teams to 12 and the duration of the event to 13 weeks for 2017. 

According to TV audience measurement agency, BARC, PKL is the most popular non-cricket sports property today. It had 61 per cent of the non-cricket television viewership pie followed by Indian Super League (football) at 16 per cent in 2016. (Note: PKL had 2 seasons in 2016 unlike ISL). The growth in viewership has not only helped Star get advertisers and sponsors on board, but also helped franchises attract the moolah. 

The network is ramping up marketing efforts, advertising in multiple languages and focusing on the heroes of the sport, thereby familiarising viewers with the players’ faces. While the national campaign has been conceptualised by the Star Sports marketing team, the Tamil promo that is currently on air has been designed by JWT Chennai. 

What has drawn the brands in? The league sees the most viewership in tier-II and III towns (NCCS C accounts for 45 per cent of the viewership), increasingly attractive target centres for e-commerce and all brands looking to expand their footprint. Besides, the league attracts the economically active population (15-50 years account for 70 per cent of the total viewership according to BARC India). An added attraction, for brands targeting women, has been that they make for 44 per cent of the viewership. 

With the game gaining viewership and brands coming in, it became an attractive proposition that the network could cash in on. “Despite steep and continuous investment, we decided not to part with the title sponsorship for four seasons. We were convinced it had to be an unqualified success and ready to become bigger and even better before we shook hands with a partner who would become its title sponsor,” says a Star India spokesperson. 

The ad-sales team did not pitch for the title sponsorship in the initial seasons, but the network promoted the league heavily, branding the sport as a Star India property. That helped the broadcaster fine tune its involvement too, getting the number of teams and seasons right for instance. The format of the game has been tweaked to make it more TV friendly, there are more graphics on the screen demystifying the game for new viewers and providing more branding opportunities for companies. 

“The challenge was to take Kabaddi, a sport which had been ignored, perhaps even relegated to the background of our collective consciousness and put it right in the centre of India’s socio-cultural radar where it not only beeped brightly, but it would be no exaggeration to say that it shone through like a meteor,” says the spokesperson for Star India. 

Kabaddi has played a big part in the network’s thrust into non-cricket sports, which the spokesperson adds, has been the objective from the start. In order to take the sport to as many households as possible, the broadcaster telecast PKL on Star Gold, the flagship Hindi movie channel from the network. This made the tournament easily accessible and visible to the core target audience of male viewers in the heartland. 

The inaugural season of the league registered a reach of 435 million viewers (cumulative), making it the second most viewed tournament in India after the Indian Premier League in 2014. (Reach is no longer used as a measure of viewership, BARC uses impressions instead and hence the numbers between 2014 and 2017 are not comparable.) 

“A few years ago kabaddi was restricted to certain sections. Post the inception and success of the league, it has become a household name,” says Saumya Khaitan, CEO of Dabang Delhi KC, one of the franchisees. As the fifth season gets going, advertisers will be looking out for the numbers more keenly than ever before.