When, on a glittering, ‘clubby’ evening in the company of several leaders and young stars From Mumbai’s advertising worldat an upmarket downtown resto-café, Gayatri Yadav, President & Head Consumer Strategy & Innovation, Star India, announced the Star Re.Imagine Awards, she also shared some important insights on the dimensions of Star India’s re-imagining of the VIVO IPL 2018.
In a superb walk-through studded with a few truly iconic all-time great campaigns, Yadav, addressing the gathering, revealed that “The way we see the reimagining of the VIVO IPL is really in three dimensions: the first is putting fans at the heart of the VIVO IPL; the second is Hotstar going From Solo to Social, and the third is really about leveraging the power of multi-screen to do something incredible… and these become possibilities for us to partner with you (the advertising fraternity) to create some magic and some disruption.”
Yadav believes, and she said, that “Advertising on sports can actually be the second game and can be as important as the game itself.”
So the Star Re.imagine Awards seem a logical and brilliant initiative to leverage the potential of the platform provided by the VIVO IPL and transform advertising on sports by celebrating, encouraging and awarding the top two advertising campaigns which would be selected by a power-packed jury. A jury comprising of advertising legend Sir John Hegarty, celebrated ad guru PiyushPandey, acclaimed filmmaker and brilliant long-form storyteller Raju Hirani, consumer marketing veteran VibhaRishi, and renowned digital evangelist Rahul Welde and acclaimed adman V Sunil.
Yadav said she hoped “the Star Re.Imagine Awards will inspire advertisers and marketers to create their best ever, most creative ad campaigns” because the VIVO IPL 2018 on Star this year represents a never-before multi-screen opportunity of television and digital to build brands amongst the single largest audience of passionate sports fans and lovers of cricket and entertainment anywhere in the world.
We agree.
700 million-plus is an audience size that the IPL has had to wait ten years to hope for. And with Star India’s plans for the VIVO IPL this year, that number seems well within reach, considering how well the first two non-events of last year — the auction and the retention–performed this year. In spite of being a non-event, the retention event of VIVO IPL 2018 attracted 11 million people. Fans this year glued themselves to the VIVO IPL auction with a viewership record of 46 million, and clocked over a million tweets, which is about six times more than last year’s.
Yadav referred to the other great global sporting passion, saying, “We’ve seen the Super Bowl show us that with some incredible examples.”
“The Super Bowl,” she said, “has been watched by 120 million viewers… the IPL last year was watched by 500 million viewers, and the Vivo IPL 2018 will be watched by 700 million-plus viewers. Sothat makes it way bigger than the Super Bowl; that makes the VIVO IPL 2018 the ‘hyperbowl’ of India. Without the hyperbole.”
Star India has latched on to the one big, powerful quality that drives the fans’ connect with any great sporting event. Yadav iterated it extremely well during the launch event when she said, “People ask me what is common between sports and creativity, what is the common link? And the simple answer is: passion.
“You walk into a sports stadium and people are virtually giving their lives on that field… there’s incredible passion on the field… amongst the fans, the spectators. I have never seen such hyper engagement for any other (kind of) event.”
“You take that passion and you multiply that reach, and you have an incredible, hyper-engaged audience of consumers. A nation stops when a tournament is on… so that is incredible potential… it has real potential to do something really different. There is nothing that delivers higher passion and higher reach than sports. But if we really ask ourselves — it is a question I ask myself: do we truly leverage this platform?”
Which brings us to how Star India is leveraging passion in its re-imagining of the VIVO IPL 2018: by keeping fans at the core of the re-imagination. And Star plans to launch VIVO IPL in virtual reality on Hotstar, giving fans a dugout experience From their homes.
On Hotstar going From Solo to Social, Yadav said, “We will bring the stadium experience to millions of homes. The Hotstar team has some incredible tech for the first time with live VR, which no other tournament in the world has delivered — a live VR are in a massive tournament.”
Six Languages, hyper-localregional fan clubs, VR, the combined power of Television and Digital, futuristic tech giving viewers on digital the dugout experience and allowing them to participate in contests and to win big, to not only promise a never-before cricketing and passion entertainment experience, but also challenging that most creative community of Indian advertisers to better their best creative advertising to ensure that both, the cricket and the ads during the breaks,are far more compelling viewing than ever before.
No wonder, the Re-imagination of the VIVO IPL by Star India is something that the IPL’s previous broadcaster could not envision in a decade.
Authored By: Yohan PC
