In the earlier post, I tried to explore the sports consuming audience in India. We discussed about the approximate number of audiences who can be termed as fans for the top 5 sports and their geographical location in India
In this post, we explore the relationship between sports and brands in India
How much did brands spend on sports advertising in 2021?
After a rather ‘unconventional’ 2020 hit hard by the pandemic, brands in India bounced back to spend as much as they did pre-Covid period in 2019. Overall brands spent almost $10.03 billion in advertising across all media
On sports spends, the GroupM ESP India Sports Sponsorship report states a total spend of $1.28 billion including sponsorship, media and endorsement
If we consider only the media spends, then brands spent approximately 8.1% of their total advertising spends towards sports. If I dare to add the sponsorship and endorsement spends as part of advertising, then the total spends on sports would be about 12.8% of the total
Curiously, Indian brands spends 63.5% of the total spends on media, totally overwhelming the sponsorship spends at 30.5% and endorsement spends at 6%
Are brands biased towards cricket?
Indian sports, as has been often stated, is characterized by cricket. As seen earlier, the number of cricket consuming audience (approximately 400m) is more than twice that of the next popular sport, understandably, football (120m-150m). But the ratio multiplies more than seven times when it comes to brands advertising on cricket versus cumulative advertising on other sports. A logical explanation could be that brands believe almost every person in India would be associated with cricket in some way or the other but that’s too much of a supposition.
But numbers don’t lie, do they?
Of the $1.28b, cricket grabs a massive bite of 88% of the spends pie and the rest of the sports a paltry 12%
Here’s the fact, advertisers spent close to $400 million on media during the 2021 IPL and less than $30 million on Indian Super League, the flagship representation of Indian football, an astonishingly paltry 6.7%!
This leads to few pertinent questions:
Why are brands less confident on football and other emerging sports?
Why do we see such a high concentration on media spends and low on team sponsorships?
I’ll try to give my reasons
Cricket Roars!
All the questions are somewhat interlinked.
To get a better picture, we will have to take a step back and try to understand the sports ecosystem of India.
Indian sports leagues, be it cricket, football or any other emerging sports are really limited period competitions.
IPL runs for 60 days
ISL runs for 4 months
Pro Kabaddi League runs for 2 months
And so on…
Most of the players are signed / retained for a single season.
For the rest of the year, there’s hardly any discussion or communication around the team or league.
The buzz around the league begins about a month prior to the league start.
Every league has a different promotion theme every year.
All the above reasons lead to a certain inconsistency around the league communications and brands would find it difficult to concentrate or engage their audience around the team they sponsor.
As a result, most of the sponsorships are confined to that particular season.
This leads to a situation where the league or the club in question does not spend additional resources and efforts towards knowing & understanding its fans and audiences. The reliance on reaching out and all communications are left to the broadcasting channel who do their best to create a series of programs to retain the audiences for the specified league duration.
Such a situation obviously demands high media spends
Coming to the first point on a somewhat lesser degree of confidence on emerging sports, it stems from the fact that there has not been a sustained effort to identify and nurture the emerging sports communities.
Brands like to put their trust towards a more accepted cricket than bother spend extra resources towards finding out the football loving fans amongst their consumers
So, let sleeping dogs lie?
The sporting ecosystem in India demands a greater reliance on media spends. That is not likely to change in the near future. However, going forward, we can expect to see a better degree of fan engagement and brand communication during the tournament period
Brand’s approach towards global sports properties like English Premier League, the biggest global sports property in India, can however, be changed for the better if there is a change in approach strategy from the property.
I’ll write about it in the next post, till then, happy reading :)