 "Top brands in marketing frenzy as India catches Euro fever")
Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN), which will air the tournament on its sports and entertainment channels, has also roped in other advertisers, having sold almost 70 per cent of the advertising inventory. Sources close to the development reveal that the brand has committed around Rs 8-10 crore towards sponsorship.
Among those who have committed spends are Honda Cars India, Idea, Carlsberg, Hero Cycles, Crompton Greaves, Micromax, YES Bank and Renault. The network is in talks with e-commerce players such as Amazon, OLX and Paytm and hopes to sign advertising deals to fill the inventory further. The tournament will be telecast on Sony SIX and Sony ESPN channels at the primetime slots of 6:30 pm and 9:30 pm, and 12:30 am. SPN's sales team has quoted a rate of Rs 2.25-2.5 lakh for ad-spots and according to Rohit Gupta, president, network sales, SPN, most brands have accepted this. Gupta says, "Advertisers have warmed up to the idea of investing in football. It is no longer about convincing brands to buy spots on football properties. Brands now do not need much convincing to spend Rs 5-7 crore on a big football tournament. This is a big difference from FIFA (World Cup in 2014)," he adds. In 2014, FIFA World Cup ad-spots sold for around Rs 1.75 lakh, though some of the bigger matches were sold at around Rs 2 lakh.
Most brands are male centric, as a majority of viewers for the sport are male. This is the reason fast-moving consumer goods brands like HUL and P&G, which are usually big spenders on TV, are missing from the sponsor roster.
"We want to run a campaign for the BR-V during the Euro 2016. It is a spot sponsorship deal. We are targeting the BR-V on sports, adventure, and travel platforms. It is performing better than expectation and we want to take this further. Cumulatively we have sold more than 10,000 units of the SUV," said a company source at Honda.
SPN is continuing an experiment it started in 2014 where it had multi-lingual feeds for the FIFA World Cup with a Bengali feed on Sony Aath, the Bangla entertainment channel under the network. Euro 2016 will be available in six languages, English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Sony SIX will telecast the English language feed while Sony ESPN will give viewers the other options.
Prasana Krishnan, executive vice-president and business head of Sports Cluster, SPN, says, "When we experimented with the Bengali feed, we realised that there is an appetite for the sport in the regional markets. With Euro 2016, we intend to test out more markets and so we have added three more languages. It is perhaps the first time in India that a non-cricket tournament of this scale will be available in so many languages."
According to the ESP Properties - SportzPower India Sports Sponsorship Report 2016, on the back of Hero Indian Super League (ISL), ground sponsorship for Football shot up from Rs 59.5 crore in 2014 to Rs 114 crore in 2015, a jump of 91.6 per cent. (A comparison of television ad-rates year-on-year would be unfair as different properties like FIFA World Cup, EPL etc attract different interest because of geographical appeal and time slots. In case of the ISL, the on-ground and on-air deals are bundled.)