In conversations around IPL 2025, a recurring pattern has been hard to ignore. Brands are investing more, reaching larger audiences than ever before, and yet walking away with less clarity on what that scale is actually delivering. The ecosystem has never been bigger, but for many marketers, the outcomes have never felt less precise. That gap between scale and certainty is becoming central to how sports marketing in India is being evaluated today.
The scale itself is not in question. IPL 2025 drew over 450 million viewers across TV and digital, and the advertiser count grew 27% over the previous season, with 141 new brands entering the property for the first time. Those numbers are a testament to how commercially dominant the IPL remains. They’re also precisely what’s creating the problem. When the number of brands competing for attention inside the same nine-week window keeps growing, the math on individual brand impact becomes harder to defend. Reach is not the same as resonance, and in a clutter of this scale, the gap between the two is widening.
What has changed considerably is the audience itself. The IPL fan of 2025 is not passively receiving a broadcast. According to research published ahead of the IPL 2025 season, 86% of cricket fans are consuming content on mobile while simultaneously watching the match on television. They’re on social media, they’re in group chats, they’re watching creators dissect the same delivery that just happened three seconds ago. The match is one input among many. And 92% of cricket fans now prefer consuming IPL content in their native language, a 29% jump from the previous season, which means the conversation isn’t even happening in a single register anymore. It’s fragmented, regional, and deeply platform-native.
This matters for how brands think about their presence. A broadcast spot during the match is reaching a viewer who is simultaneously elsewhere. The moment the boundary is hit, half the audience has already opened Instagram. Which is not an argument against broadcasting. It’s an argument for not treating broadcast as the whole strategy. The brands that held their own through IPL 2025 were largely the ones that had built something to say across those parallel conversations, not just the one happening on screen. Swiggy’s “Sixes” campaign is a good example of this thinking: a live discount that unlocked every time a six was hit, updating in real time on the app, so the cricket moment directly triggered a commerce moment. It wasn’t a separate campaign running alongside the IPL. It was the IPL, made useful.
Creator-led marketing followed a similar logic. JioCinema generated 23.4 million engagements through influencer collaborations during IPL 2024, and by IPL 2025, brands were collectively expected to invest Rs 550 crore in influencer-driven campaigns around the tournament. Studies pegged influencer-led IPL campaigns at 65% brand recall and close to 60% engagement rates, numbers that compare favourably to traditional digital formats by a significant margin. The reason isn’t difficult to understand. A creator talking about a brand in the middle of a match discussion is already inside the fan’s chosen experience. That’s a fundamentally different kind of contact than a pre-roll that gets skipped.
All of this points toward something larger about how the relationship between brands and sports properties is being renegotiated. And this is where the conversation moves beyond just the IPL, into what sponsorship itself is becoming. The GroupM ESP Sporting Nation 2024 report, which put the overall Indian sports industry at Rs 16,633 crore with 6% year-on-year growth, contained a number that I think is more instructive than the headline figure: athlete endorsements grew 32% to Rs 1,224 crore, the steepest annual rise in 14 years. And within that, non-cricket endorsements, Neeraj Chopra, PV Sindhu, Manu Bhaker, grew 46%. Brands are not just buying tournament inventory. They’re building associations with individuals whose stories travel year-round and across categories.
That shift carries an implicit argument about what sponsorship is for. The traditional model, logo on jersey, broadcast exposure, evaluation by reach, was built around scarcity of attention. You bought the asset because you could. Today’s environment is the opposite; attention is everywhere and therefore harder to earn. A brand that sponsors an athlete effectively has a continuous narrative to work with. A brand that associates with a regional league or an emerging sport, kabaddi, chess, distance running, which alone accounted for a quarter of emerging sports sponsorship growth last year, finds a more concentrated and less diluted fan relationship. These aren’t niche bets. They’re a response to the diminishing returns of fighting 141 other brands for the same set of IPL eyeballs.
What sponsorship is becoming, in practice, is a content and community strategy that happens to be anchored in a sporting property. The asset, the title, the team association, the athlete partnership, is the starting point, not the deliverable. The deliverable is everything built around it: the creator content, the real-time moments, the vernacular engagement, the fan community that extends the relationship beyond match day. Brands that are treating their sports investments this way are seeing it pay off. Those treating a sponsorship as a media buy and waiting for the tournament to do the work are, increasingly, the ones having the conversation my colleague was having about not knowing what they got out of it.
Indian sports is a genuinely exciting commercial canvas right now, diverse enough, digital enough, and fan-passionate enough to reward brands that show up with something real to say. The opportunity hasn’t shrunk. The bar for what it takes to actually use it has just risen considerably.
(Views are personal)
