World Cup dominates TV viewership, disrupts advertising

Airing of prime cricket property the world cup, preceded by the Asia Cup—has resulted in a dent in viewership and advertising for non-sports channels on television as well as streaming platforms. And the dent is sizeable.

“Cricketing data available for 10 weeks, excluding the last week of the World Cup, compared with the previous 10-week period of non-cricketing months, shows that the sports genre GRPs increased by almost 322%, all dominated by cricket,” said Chandrashekhar Mantha, partner, media and entertainment sector leader, Deloitte India. He added that overall GRPs saw a near 17% drop on TV during the cricketing season, while GRPs of general entertainment channels, or GECs, fell 19%, movies 25%, and news, 24%. GRPs stand for gross rating points, a standard to measure advertising impact.

Media buyers say non-sporting channels usually see 8-10% year-on-year growth in advertising during the festive quarter, but that may have grown only 5% this time. Further, even though OTT streaming platforms are not driven by appointment viewing, they still saw an overall impact on consumption, particularly on days when India was playing.

However, when the game paused, OTT services bounced back. “There was a 15-20% impact (on viewership) during high points of the matches. At the same time, there was a significant surge before and after, balancing the previous impact,” Soumya Mukherjee, chief operating officer at Bengali streaming service hoichoi said.

Cricket advertising expenditure this year is in the range of 8,000 crore 10,000 crore. Typically, marquee events such as IPL (Indian League) and the World Cup take up a big chunk of it, Rammohan Sundaram, president, integrated media, DDB Mudra Group said. Therefore, between the Asia Cup and World Cup, around 4,000 crore would easily be invested on cricket. Auto, FMCG, beauty products and consumer tech were the primary advertisers who drive this growth, according to Sundaram.

A senior executive at a broadcasting network said on the condition of anonymity that advertisers have sought respite from daily soaps aired through the day and replays of older episodes in the afternoons. “Also, when the tournament was available for free online, it is likely that some families were able to watch other kinds of content at night on TV,” the person added. That said, new launches were held back for the period and planned in a staggered manner to avoid getting drowned in cricket frenzy.

While popular events such as the World Cup are long known and media spends planned much in advance, industry experts said the impact on non-sports genres should be significant given the spends on cricket this year. According to data from TAM Sports, a division of TAM Media Research, during each month from August to November 2023, GEC was the leading channel genre with maximum ad volume share, but showed decreasing trend over the months, from 31% to 29%.

Sahil Chopra, founder CEO of digital marketing firm iCubesWire, agreed that the World Cup attracted all the ad money with its buzz, and a 20-25% increase in ad rates was observed compared with the IPL.

Despite the non-appointment driven nature of OTT, platforms said there was an impact on overall consumption with some internal calculations on what should be held back to garner greater buzz later. The same, however, balanced itself out given that OTT content can be streamed at any point during the day. The free availability of the tournament on digital platforms came at a time that digital advertising is anyway witnessing its own challenges. LiveMint