IPL3: Hit or miss?

Did the marketing and brand-building initiatives during the premier sports and entertainment event engage the consumer? A Dentsu study finds out.

Now that the dust has settled on the third edition of the Indian Premier League — the matches definitely; the controversies might take some more time to die down — it is time to check whether the various marketing and brand-building experiments actually paid off. Several new formats were tried this time.

For instance, advertisements on the big screen in the stadium were shown also on television in between deliveries. A blimp was sent up at all the stadiums. The list is long. What are the lessons for brand builders, media buyers and marketers? Dentsu has studied the engagement levels of IPL, the premier sports and entertainment event of the year. The results are nothing short of a revelation.

Though IPL3 created a lot of buzz, the engagement was less than desired. Brands that spent large sums of money to advertise during the matches didn’t get the right returns. Brands on T-shirts were lost on viewers — only those worn by the favourite team seemed to register some impact. Disruptive brands that interfered with the flow of the game got negative recall. These actually irritated viewers. The organisers of the tournament as well as brand managers need to rethink the efficacy of such spots.

Though the matches were watched in large numbers and the results were discussed threadbare the following morning, few took part in contests and bought IPL merchandise. Off the field activities of the cricketers failed to strike a chord with the fans. Some of these might not happen in IPL4. Brands need to be patient and work out how to improve the engagement with the fans. IPL is still a young property, and the upside is huge.

As far as the choice of medium is concerned, most people watched it on television. In other media, people preferred newspapers and YouTube. This was the first time that matches were loaded on YouTube; the results look encouraging. A majority of the fans did not bother to check out the websites of the various IPL teams. The cheer girls, who this time wore outfits more suited to conservative Indian sensibilities, failed to make a mark. Almost half of the respondents could not recall which team’s cheerleaders they found the best!

The study throws up some interesting facets of loyalty. A fan’s loyalty is likely to be with the team which has its favourite player rather than with his city. Somebody in Delhi may therefore root for Mumbai Indians if he happens to be a diehard fan of Sachin Tendulkar.

In other words, a team’s fans can be spread out across the country. The assumption that a team’s fandom will be concentrated around its city does not seem to hold. Dentsu found little emotional connect between a fan and the team of his city, which can be gauged from the IPL merchandise he bought. This throws up new challenges for the marketer.

For the study, Dentsu covered 1,200 respondents, out of which 1,021 were men and 179 were women. Though the sample looks skewed in favour of men, it more or less reflects cricket viewership in the country.

ENGAGEMENT LEVELS