Disney Star head of network ad sales Ajit Varghese said the network wants to help advertisers to meet their business objectives without them having to bother about the budgets. The broadcaster is offering advertising packages across SD, HD, regional, and team affinity.
The broadcaster is seeking ₹18 lakh to ₹18.5 lakh per 10-second spot from spot buyers and ₹17.5 lakh to ₹18 lakh per 10-second spot from sponsors. As per market estimates, Disney Star is believed to have earned ₹3,500 crore in gross TV ad revenue from IPL 2022.
“This year, we are encouraging more brands to advertise on IPL with the budget not being a constraint. We are also reaching out to SMBs for IPL,” Varghese said.
“We are willing to work with clients to meet their reach and impression objectives. You don’t necessarily need to have ₹50 crore to ₹100 crore. We are offering that flexibility,” he added.
Despite the wider macroeconomic challenges, Varghese feels that IPL’s scheduling will work in the property’s favour from an advertising standpoint.
“IPL is coming at a time when we are going into the new financial year,” Varghese said, noting that fresh marketing budgets will be allocated by brands in the new fiscal year.”Most of the categories are doing well whether you look at FMCG, consumer durables, automobile, telecom, and handset makers,” he added.
He also said that the cautious stand being adopted by brands when it comes to ad spending is a short-term trend.
While noting that IPL’s advertiser mix has been changing in the last few years, Varghese stated that the mix is changing because any brand that wants to make an impact will want to advertise on the property.
In the last few years, private equity-funded tech startups had emerged as one of the key advertising categories for the IPL.
However, the funding winter has meant most of the startups are likely to give IPL a miss.
Varghese said TV is the most efficient and effective medium to build brands at scale in India.
While refusing to speak about the growth targets set by the company, Varghese noted that ad spending on cricket will grow at a faster pace than the overall ad market.
“According to market estimates, the Indian AdEx is growing in double-digits at 12-14%. If that pattern continues, I don’t see any reason why cricket will not grow at 20% each year,” he said.
Reacting to market sentiments that Jio Cinema’s free IPL offering will eat into Disney Star’s viewership and ad revenue share, Varghese pointed out that offering cricket for free is not a phenomenon as Hotstar had offered IPL for free for many years when it had the digital rights.
“In fact, even when IPL was offered for free on digital in the past, only a third of smartphone users opted for it,” he said, adding that TV as a platform has its own inherent strengths.
“TV has a large audience base of 900 million viewers and IPL has a lot of headroom to grow. Cricket is viewed by families. Sports is all about community viewing. A big screen has more stickiness and audience engagement. This is what advertisers are looking at,” he said.
Disney has identified high-definition (HD) TV homes as a big focus area to grow IPL’s viewership. “Last IPL, there were 53 million HD homes in 2022. The latest number is 70 million HD homes in January. By IPL, we expect it to be 75 to 80 million HD homes,” he said.
