Decoding Trade Fantasy Game’s Marketing Gameplay For IPL 2024 & More With Jaya Chahar

Launched in 2023, Trade Fantasy Game- the birth child of Jaya Chahar and Deepak Chahar’s JCDC Sports has grown multifold since its inception and the same has reflected in its approach to marketing and advertising as well.

In an exclusive interaction with Marketing Mind, Jaya Chahar, Co-founder and CEO, JCDC Sports (parent company of Trade Fantasy Game), mentioned that having a good run in its first year, TFG has almost doubled its spending on advertising and marketing this year and included a lot many new-age channels in its marketing mix.

“In our first year, we didn’t focus on performance, but prioritized brand building. We already have a well-known brand face/ambassador and co-owner, i.e.- Deepak, we already enjoy the privilege of credibility and edge in a very different way because none of the cricketers today have a platform or tech business of their own,” she stated.

Having said that, she also mentioned that for TFG, the approach to marketing from the very beginning has been that of having a mix of both- performance and brand building as, in her opinion, isolated approaches is not something that works seamlessly.

 

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For this year’s ‘Karo level Up’ ad campaign for the IPL, Chahar mentioned that TFG has roped in Cricket Commentator Aakash Chopra to feature alongside Deepak and curated more than 50+ brand assets completely in-house, unlike the yesteryear where TFG partnered with Setu Advertising’s Digital content agency- Equalz for its premier campaign.

Commenting on the decision behind shifting gears from having external agency partners for its campaigns to building in-house capabilities for marketing, she said, “The past year has been nothing short of a rollercoaster ride for us because we launched with last year’s IPL and then covered subsequent cricketing events such as the World Cup and Asia Cup. Being in the gaming and streaming ecosystem, we wanted our tech stack to be extremely strong to win the market in our first year itself. Hence, we built our tech and product team in-house in August 2023 and then replicated the same for customer support and marketing.”

Delving further, she also pointed out that sometimes what happens is creative agencies tend to take up more clients than they can handle and eventually not be able to satisfy the clients with justifiable results because having an idea is one thing and execution is another. Hence, TFG being a nimble organization with the right capabilities, as per Chahar, has resorted to building in-house capabilities to get the desired results.

Additionally, what’s also imperative, in her viewpoint, is to be able to narrate the actual story when it comes to campaigns because one person cannot execute ten campaigns at a time and that’s a challenge for many boutique agencies. However, bigger agencies, on the other hand, have their own teams and resources to deploy on a particular campaign which makes the task easier.

“Having built our capabilities in-house, we have created three products- Website, APP and a new casual game that is slated to be launched during the IPL from scratch. I strongly believe that when it comes to marketing, creative marketing and social media performance must all be synchronized and that’s why I decided to do everything in-house,” she emphasized.

Throwing light on to the tonality of the ad campaign, she mentioned that the reason behind keeping the tagline- ‘Karo Level Up’ is rooted in the fact that despite playing tremendously well in ICC Men’s Cricket T20 World Cup last year, the Indian cricket team unfortunately lost the final and therefore with this campaign, TFG wanted to match the passion and vigor of the game to provide their users with an equally amazing experience in addition to being entertained.

Furthermore, she also pointed out that conceptualized and executed in-house, the tonality of the campaign has been kept such that it seems very relatable and that too in a way that people sitting at home feel- ‘It’s my aspiration too’, and ‘I wish I could also level up in my life’.

 

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“Our decision to bring in Akash Chopra for this campaign was mainly influenced by the fact that he is one of the best cricket commentators in the country today and brings everything to life when he speaks. He has a massive influence when it comes to cricket, and the kind of people that follow him are the ones that we also want to reach out,” she said.

While talking about TFG’s marketing approach and its diverse digital portfolio of channels, she elaborated, “Last year, we didn’t use Google or Meta, so all the traffic we got was organic. However, this year we have added both Google and Meta to our digital mix in addition to adding DV360 for programmatic advertising. Apart from these, we have also bought ad spaces directly from certain sports and entertainment websites where we can find our users. We have also expanded our digital portfolio of channels to include Telegram, Snapchat, Moj, and a few others.”

Elaborating on how the platform approaches and utilizes various channels such as Meta, Google, Telegram and WhatsApp amongst others for targeted advertising and segmentation, Chahar shared that TFG firstly identifies which users does it want to target across cities in Tier I, II, III and beyond as its focus lies in complete acquisition of users pan-India and then comprehends the psyche and behaviour of those users in specific markets to develop a suitable strategy.

“Being an extremely user centric platform, we have realised that when it comes to Meta’s Family of Apps, Instagram is an excellent platform for raising awareness and engagement and WhatsApp is great for raising awareness and reaching out to users. However, if you want to retain users, Facebook is the go-to place. Similarly, if you want to personalize your user experience, Telegram is a better fit and for tier II and tier III cities it is platforms like Moj and Takatak that work well in addition to regional micro influencers,” she said.

Talking about the main unique selling points of their app, she mentioned that with the launch of TFG, the Chahar couple has tried to solve the industry-first problems through the features on the platform itself.

According to her, when one forms a team on TFG, they essentially end up getting the player cards of those players that they have selected without any extra charge, and since everyone has their own certain favorites towards whom they feel a certain sense of loyalty, they keep coming back to them no matter what the size of the platform is.

And typically, when users create their team on fantasy gaming platforms and end up losing and not being a part of the leaderboard, they get nothing for it when they return to the platform for the second time. But in TFG’s case, she stated that what sets the platform apart is that it rewards the user’s loyalty and love for cricket and cricketers by ensuring that when a user selects certain players repetitively, their player cards level up through experience points.

“So the USP of TFG is that when a user reaches level 1, he/she gets 5% extra cash reward, leading up to a 15% extra reward on reaching level 5. This allows our users to come back to TFG and keep on playing at the platform because they know that even if they lose 10 games today and win the 11th game, they will probably recover the losses of all the 10 games. Additionally, these cards can be used on different games on the platform itself because we’re not just creating one game; we’re making a whole bunch of them,” she elaborated.

The whole idea behind this, as per Chahar, is that, as a user, one has a reason to return to the app because they own something there as a motivation to return.

Concludingly, she also emphasized that the reason behind launching JCDC Sports in 2022 was the shared passion and love of herself and Deepak Chahar to create innovative and unique gaming experiences for users and since the Indian gaming ecosystem is was dominated by RMG at the time they were pondering on which segment to venture into fantasy gaming platform became the right choice.

“Our initial plan for JCDC Sports was to tap into casual gaming, mid-core gaming, and other real-money games, but things changed in 2022 when GST came into effect and caused a slowdown. Despite this, we remained committed to our plan of creating an ecosystem around fantasy gaming and launched TFG in 2023 because we wanted to take the time to create a great product, which generally takes up at least two-three years, but we were able to do it quite quickly,” she said.