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The IPL has been and continues to be one of the single biggest sports and entertainment media property in our cricket and entertainment hungry nation. The combination of celebrity, cricket and content has fuelled a mix rivalled by very few television and on-ground content across live broadcast, reality, talent and fiction shows. However, in the last season, the BCCI s crown jewel has seen stabilisation and maturing of its ability to deliver eyeballs. This led to intense debate among media, advertising and marketing pundits about its declining ability as a good platform for impactful brand communication and launches.
The first season was built around the sheer novelty of the concept and the subsequent two seasons were propelled by intense celebrity stardom, foreign cheerleaders and glamorous after-match parties. With the novelty fact now wearing off, is the IPL now entering a predictable phase with advertisers being cautious with their marketing budgets? Is a sense of audience fatigue setting in? I believe the challenge for the IPL property is to rediscover its mojo and reinvent itself. This year could be very crucial for IPL to regain the oomph factor and its support base.
The sixth season starting from April 3, 2013 has seen renewed interest with Pepsi upping the ante and investing in the title sponsorship and also joining the television sponsorship race. Other large brands across categories like Samsung, Cadbury, Tata DoCoMo Photon, Havells, and Vodafone continue to invest as sponsors. For most of them this is a continuation of their faith in this T20 journey for the last five seasons, which is a testament to the results that this juggernaut has delivered so far.
The question is, in today s uncertain environment, where budgets are scarce, how many brands have the ability to invest significant parts of their annual budgets in this two-month extravaganza? Also, are the ads becoming blind spots with so many competitive brands placing themselves in the same property? On the other hand, there are very few genres/opportunities that provide this kind of stable, high impact corridor for a duration of six weeks. IPL offers low risk in terms of engagement and viewership as it is city centric. An analysis of top TVR programmes across Hindi GECs and their relative efficiencies clearly demonstrate that IPL 5 continued to be high on reach and TVR and competitive in terms of cost per rating point. In the last season, IPL reached a record 164 million viewers, attracting 75 per cent of the cable & satellite universe. However, with every season the incremental reach, as compared to previous season, is going down and IPL 5 is showing almost the same reach as IPL 4. The average TVR for the season was 4.4, with the final touching a peak TVR of 11.5. All of this coupled with the high affinity for male audiences (a key demographic for advertisers across auto, telecom, white goods, banking and financial services and realty) makes IPL one of the most valuable consumer engagement corridor.
Will this performance sustain itself? Given the feedback from the previous season MSM (Sony Max) has started this year s investment discussions at a 10 to 15 per cent lower effective rate. This is an attempt to ensure that they optimise available inventory and create great value for advertisers. Apart from offering FCT (spot buys) and on-screen branding options (only to sponsors), the network is also putting together packages for select matches. This addresses the need for more affordable packages (outlays and ticket size is a big barrier and deterrent for not-so-deep-pocketed categories, brands and advertisers), and allowing relatively unexplored categories that have never touched cricket (let alone IPL) before for creating demand to explore this opportunity.
In a still slow-growth (<6%) economy with the CEOs demanding more RoI from their CMOs, this approach is opening up discussions easily. Even if IPL were to achieve what it did last season, it would have created great value and impact for the brands riding on it. MSM is already in the market with its Farah Khan-led campaign to create interest. With summer beginning to heat up with jersey sponsorships, on-air deals and the potential high TVR for 45 days promise, the newly signed Mumbai Indians captain Ricky Ponting and Harbhajan Singh will look to revive their competitive zest without monkeying around, as this time they play for the same side.
Ajay Kakar
CMO, Financial Services, Aditya Birla Group
To understand how relevant the IPL will be in 2013, it is important for us to understand the Indian context. Indian media is amongst the most fragmented. It continues to remain a challenge for the media planner. In print there are 200-plus publications; on TV there are more than 600 channels. Then there are 90-plus radio stations, multiplexes, digital expansion of iPads, mobiles, out-of-home opportunities at malls, commercial establishments, roads etc. Add to this the regionalisation effect and you can understand the advertisers plight. Advertising expenditure in the country growing in excess of 10 per cent CAGR makes the overall task of reaching the consumer not only difficult but also complicated. The biggest challenge is that the TV consumer is getting more and more restless and hence, today we have more than 97 per cent of the programmes delivering less than 1 TVR.
In this scenario we have IPL, which for 60 days reaches prime-time audiences, delivering high ratings year on year. It has a heady mix of exciting T20 cricket, international as well as local cricketers fighting for their teams combined with entertainment provided not only by Bollywood but also other regional superstars. The result is a consistent year-on- year rating of 4+ with key matches delivering more than 10 rating points. When this is further dissected into cities we have ratings that average more than 10 when a home team is playing. Ex-Kolkata gets a rating of more than 10 every time the Kolkata Knight Riders take to the field.
The biggest advantage of IPL is that it has created opportunities across mediums. It is relayed live on TV and digital including mobile. On ground, it has created an absolute frenzy with every match witnessing full-house. Publications across the country carry the results on the front page, followed by special sections devoted towards IPL. All these create ample opportunities for the advertiser to associate with IPL, whether live or non-live. There are few events which allow an advertiser to create a single line of communication across mediums. Even non-live IPL can compare itself with some of the top shows on ratings as well as on entertainment quotient.
IPL allows advertisers to map their communication to the content and create a synergy between the creative and media. Given our media landscape, this a big advantage because it is next to impossible for brands to create multiple renditions of their communication to match the content.
The biggest differentiator for the IPL is the way brands can leverage their communication on ground. Brands can associate centrally or locally through teams. Nokia in the past had associated only with Kolkata and had created a 360-degree communication around Knight Riders. As per GroupM research, it was one of the highest recalled brands during that particular season.
IPL in its very first year broke all barriers and established itself as a high reach platform. This reach has only grown year on year and it has attracted not only male and the youth audiences but also the female audiences.
While there is no doubt that the IPL is the biggest event the country has to offer, the question remains at what price? A 10-second cost of IPL is higher than most top events on TV such as Kaun Banega Crorepati, Big Boss, etc. The cost per rating point (CPRP), the metric which media buyers use to evaluate efficiency of programmes, is comparable to the top events. Hence, CPRP is per se not an issue. The real issue lies in the number of matches multiplied by the number of spots per match. For a tournament that lasts for almost 60 days, a sponsor needs to buy FCT anywhere in the range of 120 to 240 seconds to have a presence in 76 matches. This leads to outlays in the range of Rs 45-80 crore. This could be the annual budget for a lot of advertisers. Even if you were to buy only spots or select matches you would need an outlay of Rs 10-20 crore to create sustainable impact for the brand. In contrast to live IPL, non-live is more advertiser-friendly as Rs 7-10 crore can give you sustained presence for 60 days.
There is no doubt that IPL is the single-biggest impact window for most advertisers. The way Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup and ICC World Cup have been relevant for key advertisers, IPL has/is moving in the same direction. The big challenge for IPL is to attract the small advertisers.
Jai Lala
Principal partner, The Exchange, Mindshare
