Leveraging Connected TV (CTV) for sports marketing, especially for events like the Cricket World Cup in India, can be a powerful strategy due to the massive viewership and engagement surrounding such events.

At the e4m CTV Conference Atique Kazi, President - Data, Performance & Digital Products, Group discussed with panellists Dhruv Dhawan, Head of Ads, Disney+ Hotstar, Madhu S. Dutta, Head Marketing & GM Brands; Raymond Limited, Abhijit Shah, Head-Marketing, Digital Business and Customer Experience, ICICI Prudential AMC; Anjali Krishnan, Head of Media, Mondelez India and Arkaprava Ray, SVP & Head Brand Partnership, HSBC to discuss how CTV can be leveraged for sports marketing and the opportunities that lie ahead with regards to the upcoming Cricket World Cup.

Speaking of the rising cricket fever due to CWC, Dhawan shared, “As of yesterday, we have a daily stand-up revenue call that's come up on my calendar, which means that we are running very fast towards all the partnerships and raking in ad dollars.”

When it comes to key considerations and the thought process of selecting which specific medium or screens to advertise on, Krishnan believes where there is a more premium brand that wants to advertise to the high purchase propensity audience, that's where CTV comes into play. But mass reach goes on to TV and digital.

“Having a connected TV means you need to have a subscription, you need to have a cable connection, you need to have a smart TV. So there is a slightly more premium audience compared to the mass-market brands that I advertise to. And we also know that these are audiences I would not reach through linear TV because they're cord-cutters,” she added.

With the investments that are happening towards sports, a lot of advertisers have actually skipped from HD and parked those investments into CTV.

Ray further delved into this and shared, “So 2020, internet inside households in India was around 36 percent of households and now we are at 52 percent. That is a considerable jump. Now, once you have the internet, you can obviously get into a connected TV environment. So at this point in time, moving from HD to CTV has happened.”

Shah of ICICI highlighted that it depends on what is the campaign’s objective. When people talk about any financial services advertising, it is not about advertising, but about performance marketing. Largely saying, everything is performance marketing.

“This is because the kind of targeting that you can do today is magnificent. In fact, you can target whatever audience you want, what time you want, and then you can design a campaign to integrate it reversely from the whole communication thought, plus the kind of value adds, segments or innovations that one can have on connected TV is way ahead of what one can do on linear TV. So, if the objective is to drive sales or to drive that month's numbers, we believe, there's no choice but to over-index on CTV,” he added.

But there is a mass belief that CTV audiences are considered premium. Is that really true?

On this, Dutta said, “Considering the category and the brand that I handle, yes, CTV has an affluent audience, and it also helps us to target that set of an audience through a CTV platform.

When talking about a suit, it is a premium product. So therefore, using a connected TV platform where the audience is already in the mind frame of buying a premium product, really works, as per her. It immediately segregates the set of TG that the brand would like to not address because it's a high-end product.

In the end, Kazi focussed on what is stopping advertisers from putting in all chips behind CTV completely.

Better measurements, better data, rather more uniform data is the key, according to Shah. Dutta pinpointed the scale as in to target critical mass is still a challenge on CTV.

Dutta believes it's a mix of both since when you invest money on a medium, you want the max out of it.

For Ray, they are already the most on CTV but better measurement is something that would help them leverage the medium more.