Click to play videoMumbai: It's not just cricket that's been rejuvenated after India's win at the Twenty20 World Championships. Advertisers who were slacking off placing money on cricket are now sitting up in their seats.
As a nation held its collective breath, dozens of media planners and advertisers breathed easy. Twenty20 has brought cricket back with a bang. In fact, advertisers who missed the T20 bus found ad slots for the final selling at a 30-35 per cent premium.
Sashi Sinha, CEO of Lodestar Universal says, "Those who were trying to jump into the bandwagon in the last 2-3 days depending on the Indian performance, obviously for them ESPN hiked their rates."
While final TRPs are yet to come, a figure of 15.2 for the earlier India-Pakistan match on September 14 is a pointer.
The combined channel viewership of ESPN and Star Cricket was half of the TV viewing market at 47.2 per cent.
And ESPN-Star Sports is laughing all the way to the bank with revenues of Rs 115 crore from the final of which only Rs 40 crore came from sponsors. The rest came from ad spots which sold for Rs 7-10 lakh for just 10 seconds.
For corporates like Reliance Communications who gambled on this unknown format and young team, it definitely paid off.
Sanjay Behl, Head of Brand and Marketing, Reliance Communications, says: We had bet on it that it will be successful in opening a completely new diaspora of consumer segment watching this particular format, and I think it is getting ratified with the initial results it has got."
Ad rates are expected to drop, but not by much for the India-Australia series later this month.
Meenakshi Madhwani, Managing Partner of Spatial Access says, "I think media costs in India are among the lowest in the world. So there is absolutely no problem in cricket costs going up if what they deliver is much more than, let's say, what they did in the past."
Players, too, will be richer, with endorsement rates expected to rise by almost 50 per cent.
In fact, ads featuring cricketers which were quietly shelved after the World Cup debacle are now being dusted and brought back, especially those with India's latest super heroes, MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh. And sports channels have nothing to fear either.
So with resurgent viewer interest, it seems the biggest numbers in the game will continue to be found off the field.
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