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BCCI title sponsors open to extending bilateral cricket deal
Despite all the talk of bilateral cricket being overshadowed by IPL and ICC events, sponsors continue to see value for the nationwide reach it offers and year-round schedule.
From colas to telecom, start-ups to digital finance, when it comes to cricket sponsorships in India, one burdened sector makes way for another to come to the rescue.
Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) title sponsors Mastercard, who recently took over from Paytm for seven months – paying Rs. 3.8 crores per match - are already counting the gains.
“It’s an expensive pilot, but an opportunity for us to express ourselves with cricket. We have been bowled over with what we got in the first 9 matches, so far,” Nikhil Sahni, Mastercard, South Asia head said. “In terms of eyeballs, we reached 220 million people in 9 matches which is a huge number. Our brand scores from being muted and we are now far ahead of the competition. Our numbers from analytics are right up there. We didn’t budget for this. The response has been overwhelming.”
Throughout 2022, the talk in cricket has been of bilaterals losing out to the rising league calendar and annual ICC world events. But in the Indian market, there’s always a new advertising segment, a new sponsor out to leverage cricket’s reach. “Before we took the BCCI sponsorship, our brand had taken a hit from the embargo imposed on us. While we were parallelly working with the regulator, we were also conscious about doing something to bring the brand back to its rightful position. That’s when the opportunity with cricket came up,” Sahni said.
“Look, IPL is the rockstar. But it is 8 weeks and it’s cluttered. Also, IPL title sponsorship is more expensive,” he explained. “So, I think there is still a lot of value to bilaterals. The other advantage is that being a global brand, we get eyeballs across the world because the Indian diaspora follows cricket.”
BCCI has already unveiled a wholesome bilateral plan for the next four years for which media rights will soon go for sale. With the attractiveness of reaching out to Tier 2 cities, the digital payments major say ‘they are open to extending their bilateral title rights deal’, which comes to an end by March 2023.
WOMEN’S IPL
While the opportunity to hook up with IPL will come only in 2024, Mastercard are looking equally closely at women’s cricket. “Although the eyeballs are always captured by the men’s team, the bilaterals also include the women’s team. For us, it's a very powerful opportunity,” he said. “The upcoming women’s IPL title rights will also be a very interesting option. We don’t know what sort of dollar we are looking at. But it aligns very much with what we want to do.”
“Also, ICC is something we could look at. They have a World Cup in India, next year. They are equally keen to get more active on the women's side. We have fundamentally taken a call to be active in cricket and the initial response seems to suggest that this is going to be for a long haul.”
MS Dhoni is one of their brand ambassadors and the MNC is looking at marketing synergy during the forthcoming matches.
