Gulf Oil Lubricants and Dentsu Creative have teamed up to unveil the ‘Unstoppable Army’ of Chennai Super Kings (CSK) fans.
The campaign was kicked off with a behind-the-scenes film, featuring CSK players, led by MS Dhoni, as they arrived on set prepared to shoot the Gulf Oil ad.
Notes a communique: “The Gulf Unstoppable Army campaign is a initiative that fosters a deeper connection between the brand, the fans, and the team. Leveraging digital platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook for the campaign’s launch and subsequent fan-generated content, Gulf aims to create a cohesive and engaging narrative that celebrates the spirit of cricket and its supporters.”
Whatta Sunday it was. And we couldn’t not have asked this question to Dr Bhaskar Das in the May 22 edition of Das Ka Dum.
If you wish to access the archives, please go to the Das Ka Dum tab on the website’s top navigation bar or click here: https://www.mxmindia.com/category/columns/das-ka-dum/
Q. We now know who the four qualifying teams are in IPL 2023? Your views on those who made it, and those who lost out?
A. Yes I loved most of the games this year’s IPL due to a number of reasons. First, some of the games went down the wire and the excitement was equivalent, if not more, to some thrilling OTT shows. Secondly, this year is unique where even a panipuri seller (once upon a time) or a child from a poor family of a gas cylinder employee father could be a leading run-scorer in two teams. The earnings from IPL games have changed the fortunes of their families. So, IPL isn’t just a game for entertainment. It’s also an economic transformation engine for some people. I am referring to Yashasvi Jaisawal of RR and Rinku Singh of KKR. Their stories are so inspiring and it proves that if one has talent, one can excel.
I know I am not adhering to your core question but could not resist the temptation of sharing my thoughts on this year’s IPL.
The first three qualifying teams deserved to be there as they were consistent in their performances. The real dark horse is MI- the fourth qualifying team, but they earned it by their own merit which flourished a tad late. The teams at the bottom are consistent in non- performance. The other teams lacked consistency in performance like KKR, RR and Punjab Kings. Inconsistency happens when the team performance is over-dependent on a few stars as in case of RCB. It’s a team game. The team must have one solid power play batsman and a bowler, one middle level batsman who can build partnership, a pinch hitter for the last 2/3 overs and a good spinner. The team which has mix of these qualities is GT who has an Indian coach who acts like a FIFA coach ie he is so passionate to dynamically guide the team. And of course an inspiring leader/ captain.
Any of the four teams can be this year’s IPL winner, as a lot depends on the ground conditions and on that day how the team plays. As they say, in T-20 a team is as good as the last game.
Taboola, the recommendations engine for the open web, has released the readership insights for the month of April, 2022. Although Taboola is often considered adversely impacting the user experience, it offers much-need advertising dollars to publishers, and guess that’s what matters.
Here are some of the key insights revealed from the readership trends released:
1. The threat of new Covid Wave
The rising cases of coronavirus in the subcontinent alerted the readers as Taboola Newsroom saw a 65% surge in readership to 23MN pageviews peaking in mid-April. As Delhi and NCR region reported maximum cases, article headlines mentioning Delhi and COVID also peaked by 137%.
2. India’s love for cricket
Nothing causes a stronger buzz in India as much as cricket does. The new season of IPL caused an 877% surge in the readership by drawing a traffic of 14MN pageviews over the last 45 days. As people searched to gather updates about their favorite teams and players, Chennai Super Kings gained a lot of traffic during the season since the start of March while Gujarat Titans and Punjab Kings saw a surge from mid-April.
3. Celebrating celebrity unions
The celebrity wedding of Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor caused much anticipation in the country. According to Taboola Newsroom, Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor drove 24MN (350%) and 15MN (1,831%) pageviews since early April respectively. The couple tied the knot on 14 April 2022 and continue to drive readership in the entertainment segment as the country is geared up to know more about the newlyweds.
TVS Eurogrip, the two- and three-wheeler tyre brand, rolled out its new brand campaign – ‘Whistle Through Every Turn’- building on its association with Chennai Super Kings. The campaign includes a set of three new advertising films that accentuate the positioning of the brand as The Bike Tyre Specialist.
The films feature M S Dhoni as the main protagonist, narrating his gripping biking adventures to his teammates. The stories are woven with suspense and light-hearted humor, crafted to connect with the millennials.
Commenting on the new campaign, P Madhavan, EVP – Sales & Marketing, TVS Srichakra Limited, said: “Our last campaign ‘Tame The Turns’ was received well amongst our audience. We are happy to have woven this insight in an interesting way to create a set of #GrippingStories with CSK players. Apart from TV and Digital advertising, the campaign includes on-ground activations and channel partner programmes.”
Nippon Paint launched a new TVC, in line with its fifth year of partnership with leading Indian Premier League cricket franchise, Chennai Super Kings.
Speaking about the association, S Mahesh Anand – President, Nippon Paint (India) Private Limited (Decorative Division) said: “We are delighted to yet again team up with IPL’s most celebrated team, the Chennai Super Kings and say ‘Yellow’ to another IPL season.”
Added Mark Titus- Assistant Vice-President- Marketing, At Nippon Paint India Private Limited (Decorative Division): “We see cricket as something that draws us Indians together and spreads much cheer and celebration amongst Nippon Paint’s customers and Indians across the world. We are excited about what CSK has in store for us. For our customers, we have just the colour to celebrate IPL and CSK – the Nippon Paint ‘CSK Yellow’. Apart from that, we have a series of digital ads and contests on our social media pages for CSK fans to look forward to. With the CSK Yellow, we are all set for IPL!”
With the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2022 season set to witness 55 matches be held in Mumbai, five time champions Mumbai Indians have splashed huge hoardings covering the entire city to welcome the fellow nine franchises.
A dash of yellow to ‘Welcome Chennai Super Kings – Whistle Podu Dil Khol Ke,’, while Kolkata Knight Riders are welcomed to the city with their iconic ‘Korbo Lorbo Jeetbo Dil Khol Ke slogan. The #WelcomeDilKholKe billboards, customised to each of the visiting teams, have been set up across key locations in the city, uses a creative rendition to bring alive the spirit of sports, excitement and affection.
Said an unnamed Mumbai Indians spokesperson: “The billboards installed across the city capture the creative expressions of the spirit of Mumbai – the city of dreams which welcomes every individual to its land of opportunity. We, Mumbai Indians are a reflection of the city, its ethos and this campaign is a tribute to the warmth of the people of Mumbai in welcoming all the franchises of our IPL family.
“With IPL back in India and in Mumbai, Mumbai Indians look forward to welcoming its loyal blue & gold Paltan back to the stadiums. We take pride in having one of the most passionate fan army – the Paltan who have backed the team for a decade and more with their unrelenting energy and enthusiasm.”
Screengrab from Disney+Hotstar website (https://www.hotstar.com/)
By Vikas Mehta
I write this review while watching the final of the Indian Premier League (IPL). For me, the tournament and the players had lot of parallels with the ads that were on the air. Let’s dive into these.
This tournament saw a revival in fortunes of established teams like Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR). As well as some old stars like Uthapa and Du Plessis. Advertisements which ran in the first edition of this IPL and were then forgotten saw a revival in this extended edition of IPL. Finolex, Phone Pe, Unacademy, Dream 11, Mutual funds….
This IPL saw a lot of established players disappoint. Rohit Sharma, the Pandya brothers, Rahul Chahar, Hazelwood, Morgan, Dinesh Karthik, Rabada… all disappointed. Similarly ads from established brands like Coke, Thums Up, Ceat, Berger Paints, Sprite… disappointed. Eminently forgettable performances.
In the league stage, Delhi Capitals dominated the tournament by winning 10 out of their 14 games. Similarly edtech as a category dominated the ad scene. Byju’s, Byju’s Adarsh, Byju’s Whitehat Jr, Lido small group tuitions, Unacademy, UpGrad, Great Learning etc showed the potential and dominance of the category.
For M S Dhoni there was double success. While his contribution to CSK lifting the trophy was not all that significant, his single-handed contribution of appearing in most number of ads was unmatched. Homelane, Dream 11, ITC Yipee, Mutual Funds sahi hai, Indigo paints all benefitted with the free time he has since his retirement. I won’t be surprised to see him soon in some ed tech ad too.
The last few matches of the tournament saw a new campaign by Dream 11. Captioned Dream Big, the campaign I thought was a standout. Using different players, they used a different narrative for each under the Dream Big Umbrella. It’s interesting storytelling and flexible format was excellent. I liked almost all the ads, with Hardik Pandya, Dhawan and Bumrah being my favourites. A standout performance almost like the performance of K Rahul and Harshal Patel who stood tall amongst the batsmen and bowlers respectively.
Venkatesh Iyer was the star new kid on the block. He played aggressively and even had a good differentiation because he can roll over his arm effectively. The Oven Story ad was a good parallel here. A seemingly new entrant, at least as an IPL advertiser, the brand had interesting differentiation in the Pizza category and created a good enough impact for my daughter to order for it.
While the performer of the tournament was a difficult choice between Gaikwad, Iyer and Patel, for me the best ad performance came from Neeraj Chopra in the Cred ad. He blended well into the narrative and looked as natural as he does on the athletic field. But the new Cred ad featuring Kapil Dev on the last day was a total disappointment. It did not have the energy and joie de vivre that all the other Cred ads have had. It looked like the opening ceremony of most IPL tournaments. Too much pomp. Very little narrative.
But overall the ads were very tepid. The use of celebrities dominated the scene. Dhoni, Ranveer Singh, Kohli, Bumrah etc were omnipresent. The narrative though was predictable and in most cases just relying on star power. Frankly, the second half of IPL was similar. With just two-three games going to the wire, the one-sided final was a reflection of how most of the games panned out.
The parallels continued right till the end. There was a lot of speculation about Dhoni’s retirement from IPL as a player. And the suspense continued even in the post-match interview. Will he retire or continue? Exactly the same thing happened with the Kamla Pasand surrogate ad of Amitabh Bachchan. With a holier-than-thou attitude, he made a grand statement of withdrawing from the ad and returning money for the ad as he did not know it was a surrogate ad. He obviously does not live on earth. But like Dhoni, the ad was not retired, even five days after AB’s statement. It was there in the finals too. What did disappear, albeit briefly were SRK Byju’s ads. But blink and they were back. All the twitter brouhaha lasted for just a few days.
There was one area where the parallels ended. CSK proved that old is gold. A team led by a 40-year-old with many players above 30 and retired from all other types of cricket, the team did well to win the tournament. The same, of course, cannot be said of the old traditional brands which have ceded ground to new category and brands and have been totally eclipsed. Let’s hope these new categories and brands do create new benchmarks in their advertising too. The next edition of IPL will tell us if that comes true. Till then au revoir, sayonara, alvida, tata.
An unusual season of the Indian Premier League, held over two parts separated by six months, is concluding next Friday. Despite being held overseas, and hence no home stadia and home fans coming into play, it has been a fairly successful season, with the primetime matches ratings consistently well, with those featuring Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings or Royal Challengers Bangalore being a notch higher than those featuring the other teams. Add the streaming numbers to the TV viewership and IPL looks stronger than ever.
But by now, that’s a known thing. The success of IPL, now in its 14th year, is not exactly breaking news. I remember how the 2011 season, coming on the heels of India’s Cricket World Cup victory, had performed below par. So much so that it created reasonable doubt in the minds of stakeholders if the IPL is losing its sheen.
That’s unimaginable today. Even a choppy IPL season would be immune to that level of dip in viewership. It is now easy to predict what an IPL match will rate, if you know the teams involved and the time slot. The audience is not ‘testing’ IPL as an idea anymore. They have embraced it already. And some years ago.
IPL is an annual fixture that has different kinds of importance for different people and businesses. It is a career opportunity for aspiring cricketers, a solid marketing platform for brands, and the ‘known devil’ for GECs, who no longer fret about what their content strategy during IPL should be. They simply replicate what they did the previous year, and for good reason too. There is no mystery left to unravel after all.
And that brings me to a question that’s been bothering me for a while now: Are we satisfied with just one blockbuster sporting property in this huge country? A host of sporting leagues have been launched over the last decade, and none of them have achieved even a fraction of IPL’s success. Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) is the best of the lot, having resurrected a dying sport from a viewership perspective. But the numbers are not exactly ‘mass’, and it remains to be seen how the league performs when it is back later this year (or early next year) after a two-year hiatus.
Indian Super League, an attempt at cashing in on the growth popularity of football among India’s urban teenage and youth population, has not grown stronger with time. And the other leagues have barely managed to survive. I suspect some of them may have died a silent death during the pandemic, and may never come back at all.
Cricket itself, outside IPL, is not growing in viewership. The Olympics had great media visibility because of India’s best-ever performance, but very little numbers to show. I fear that we may have reached a point where except the IPL (and the Cricket World Cups, which are not annual fixtures anyway), we have a big hole in our sports viewership story.
India does not have a strong sporting culture, and it is that much harder to build that in a one-sport nation. The broadcasters, especially Star, have done a fair bit, such as to bring up Kabaddi as a prominent option. But the road ahead remains a tough one even there.
In 2025, will IPL still be the only sporting story India has to offer? Or is the next big idea round the corner, and we just don’t know it yet?
Media consulting firm Ormax Media has released the findings of its study on ‘IPL Franchise Fans’, based on a research conducted among 3,200 urban respondents across 23 states in India. The data was collected through the course of the eight weeks of IPL 2020. The study pegs the number of fans across the eight IPL franchises at 86 million (8.6 cr).
Chennai Super Kings (CSK) emerges as the strongest franchise, with 26.8 million fans, closely followed by season winners Mumbai Indians (MI) at 24.8 million fans. Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) ranks third, with 13.3 million fans. Between them, these three franchises account for 75% of the total fan base, while the remaining five contribute to the balance 25%.
As many as 64% (55 million) of the total franchise fans are men, while the balance 36% (31 million) are women. CSK and RCB have the most gender-balanced fan base, with the proportion of female fans being the highest at 40% each. Nationwide popularity of their star players (MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli respectively) contributes to their stronger female fan base. Mumbai Indians leads Chennai Super Kings by a slender margin when it comes to the male fan base, but the latter takes the overall #1 position because of its stronger female following.
Shailesh Kapoor
Commenting on the findings, Shailesh Kapoor, Founder & CEO – Ormax Media said: “Apart from viewership, a definitive measure of the success of a sports league is whether the teams playing in it manage to build a sizeable fan base over the years. A strong fan base is eventually the key for a profitable franchise, because it offers higher monetisation opportunities through sponsorships, ticket sales, merchandizing, licensing and other such avenues. Over the last 13 years, IPL has done very well, and the fan base estimates of the Top 2 franchises suggest that they are now two of the strongest sports teams across the world. It’s for the other franchises to learn from the success story of CSK and MI and develop a strategy to widen their fan base in the coming years”.
As the 12th edition of the Indian Premier League gears for launch with the March 23 encounter of defending champions Chennai Super Kings (CSK) taking on Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), an all-new TVC has been unveiled in an attempt to build the excitement.
Noted a communique: “Star India, with its robust network will broadcast the match in Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi and Malayalam in addition to Hindi, English, and the Select Dugout feed.”
Peter England celebrates the festive season with its new campaign featuring Chennai Super Kings team along with M S Dhoni. The TVC shows MS Dhoni, Dwayne Bravo and Shane Watson of the IPL 2018 champions the Chennai Super kings, bringing Diwali in with festive cheer with Peter England’s festive shirt collection.
Speaking on the launch, Manish Singhai, COO, Peter England said: “Through this film wanted to bring alive the essence of Diwali; Coming together. We are delighted to see the banter between Dhoni, Watson, Bravo and Vijay on-screen reflecting the camaraderie of the CSK team off-screen, and it all comes together seamlessly with our brand.â€Â
The TVC will take a multimedia approach and will be promoted across various platforms.
Gulf Oil Lubricants has announced the launch of its brand film highlighting the company’s long-standing partnership with the team of Chennai Super Kings (CSK).
Said Ravi Chawla, Managing Director, Gulf Oil Lubricants India Limited: “Gulf Oil’s successful association with Chennai Super Kings has enabled the brand to find a great connect with the fans and consumers alike. We launched Gulf Pride 4T Plus in its new packaging with the CSK Players, including MS Dhoni, Gulf Oil’s Brand Ambassador on March 30. Since then, Mr.Pride has been a perfect human embodiment of Gulf Pride 4T Plus that has created both excitement and understanding of the product’s Value proposition in the hearts of CSK fans.â€
Whatta Sunday it was. And we couldn’t not have asked this question to Dr Bhaskar Das in the May 22 edition of Das Ka Dum. 
With the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2022 season set to witness 55 matches be held in Mumbai, five time champions Mumbai Indians have splashed huge hoardings covering the entire city to welcome the fellow nine franchises.
I write this review while watching the final of the Indian Premier League (IPL). For me, the tournament and the players had lot of parallels with the ads that were on the air. Let’s dive into these.
An unusual season of the Indian Premier League, held over two parts separated by six months, is concluding next Friday. Despite being held overseas, and hence no home stadia and home fans coming into play, it has been a fairly successful season, with the primetime matches ratings consistently well, with those featuring Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings or Royal Challengers Bangalore being a notch higher than those featuring the other teams. Add the streaming numbers to the TV viewership and IPL looks stronger than ever.
