JioStar has unveiled ‘The Winning Edge’, a first-of-its-kind advertising playbook aimed at helping brands and media buyers maximise the impact of live cricket as a marketing platform. Built on billions of impression-level data points across marquee cricket properties and validated through Brand Lift Studies by Kantar, the playbook offers data-driven, outcome-focused insights for advertisers.
The report positions live cricket on JioStar as a high-impact environment for brand growth. For new entrants, campaigns delivered up to 6.9x higher brand awareness and 10.8x higher purchase intent compared to Kantar benchmarks. Established brands also saw strong results, with up to 4x higher brand awareness and 4.9x higher purchase intent, highlighting cricket’s effectiveness as both a launch platform and a sustained growth driver.
It highlights the importance of a multi-platform strategy, revealing that brands activating across Linear TV (LTV), Connected TV (CTV), and Mobile simultaneously recorded up to 7x higher purchase intent compared to single-platform campaigns. With less than 10% audience overlap across screens, the approach also delivered significant incremental reach. Combining video and display formats further strengthened outcomes, with dual-format campaigns driving up to 7.4x higher brand awareness versus video-only efforts.
It also makes a strong case for sponsorship-led strategies over standalone media buys. Brands with formal sponsorships saw up to 9x higher purchase intent and 8x higher ad awareness compared to those relying solely on inventory purchases.
Additionally, integrating PPL (Pre- and Post-Live) studio programming into media plans delivered up to 2.1x incremental gains in aided awareness, underscoring the value of sustained brand visibility beyond live match moments.
The report further identifies four high-impact in-match triggers such as Super 4s, Super 6s, DRS (Decision Review System), and Fall of Wickets (FOW) being the key drivers of brand salience. Campaigns aligned with these moments recorded uplifts of 4x to 9x in salience, 4x to 10x in awareness, and 4x to 7x in brand recall, highlighting the effectiveness of contextual, moment-led advertising.
Anup Govindan, Head of Sales, Sports, JioStar said: “The Winning Edge, developed in partnership with Kantar, is built on rigorous, data-backed analysis of how real brands have performed on our platform across categories, objectives, budgets, formats, and tournament phases.”
He also said, “The study reaffirms that when it comes to driving real outcomes such as awareness, consideration, and purchase intent, nothing matches the intensity, scale, and impact of live cricket. The depth of attention and emotional engagement during live moments creates a multiplier effect that non-live environments simply cannot replicate.”
Soumya Mohanty, MD, and Chief Client & Solutions Officer at Kantar South Asia said: “Numerous Kantar Brand Lift Studies have demonstrated the incremental impact of Live Cricket Advertising, with results consistently ranking at the top-end of Kantar’s Brand Lift database. This playbook distils those insights into actionable media planning and creative recommendations to help advertisers drive stronger outcomes in Live Cri
