Cricket Playbook: How to measure the success of your campaigns on live sports

There are few draws on OTT greater than live sports, and more so when cricket season is in full swing. Very few other genres of programming can match the excitement and passion that live sports generate, attracting audiences for brands across industries. While brands have long understood why they should hop onto the OTT live sports bandwagon, the measurement of campaign effectiveness is a critical factor in their decision.

Disney+ Hotstar has a transparent and easy-to-understand measurement model that begins with audience and content insights and ends with a close look at brand impact and  the media effectiveness.

 Audience and content insights

Good messaging and creative strategies mean little if brands don’t reach the right audience. Disney+ Hotstar offers audience insights powered by internal surveys and secondary sources like Kantar’s Target Group Index.

 This is followed by the creative A/B testing – testing the creatives amongst similar audience clusters with each cluster being shown only one creative to analyse its impact on the key performance indicator (KPI). Not only does this help identify the best creative amongst all in driving the KPI but also in understanding the right audience for the brand or product and testing the communication messaging.

 The creatives can be tested across across: 

• Duration: Brands can test creative messaging over 15 second or 20 seconds to gauge effectiveness   
• Celebrity role: A/B testing makes it possible to test the efficacy of a celebrity’s presence in a campaign, or the lack thereof
• Message: Communicating the same message in multiple ways also helps in advertisers understand the best way to relay a message to audiences

 Brand impact

 The Brand Lift Study is a survey-based exercise that helps advertisers understand the impact of their campaigns in driving mind measures among target audiences. It is done through the Control v/s Exposed Approach, an industry standard wherein identical questionnaires are served across clusters and mind measure uplifts are noted.

The study evaluates the impact on mind metrics like brand awareness, message association and purchase intention across videos and features.

The study can measure impact in two ways:

Videos:

For videos, a Brand Lift Study measures the impact of the Disney+ Hotstar campaign on mind measures such as awareness, messaging, purchase intent and more.

Non-video assets (features):

For some non-video assets that are layout (landscape/portrait) agnostic, Disney+ Hotstar is introducing an opportunity-to-see (OTS) approach. With this, brands can measure the impact of features on mind measures such as awareness, messaging and purchase intent. 

Due to the nature of these assets, the platform creates exposure cohorts based on the OTS  using the exposure of a property (like a particular match, for instance), rather than actual assets.

Media effectiveness

 The other study Disney+ Hotstar conducts is Cross Media for cross-screen attribution. It is a regression-based strategic solution that measures cross-screen impact and return on investment (RoI).

Most commonly, advertisers have the following three concerns when it comes to Cross Media campaigns: 

1. Coverage: How did the campaign deliver on reach and frequency?
2. Impact: Did the campaign’s performance add to overall KPIs?
3. Efficiency and optimisation: What channels helped build the brand more efficiently?

Simply put, Cross Media campaigns help advertisers understand the following: 

• Understand campaign performance in delivering reach and frequency, and to evaluate duplication among media touchpoints
• Understand the role each media channel in brand building, hence optimising the media mix

With the pressure on marketing budgets and need to deliver more bang for the buck, effectiveness of campaigns and the learnings from them for future campaigns are more critical than ever. With Disney+ Hotstar’s measurement solutions, brands can ensure they never go wrong on this front.