Planning and optimising an effective creative campaign for IPL 2021

Each year, the IPL is an amalgamation of excitement, celebrations and splendour that gets fans together to cheer for their favourite teams. Few other sports offer the kind of highly engaged, premium audiences that live cricket does. And when the tournament in question is the IPL 2021, advertisers are bound to want a piece of the viewers’ attention to successfully achieve their marketing goals.

Having said that, conceptualising an effective creative and media campaign takes prior planning. Also, following a few simple principles to optimise creatives helps to elevate brand campaigns from ‘good’ to ‘great’, especially in a video strategy. Here’s a look at some of these guidelines:

Need-to-know creative guidelines

A thought-through creative can make a marked difference in the way your audience receives your campaign. First off, advertisers should adhere to the CLIPS principle, especially helpful for brands aiming for higher aided awareness and message association. What CLIPS stands for is explained below:

• Clear brand role in the story: Aligning communication to context drives message association
• Last frame, but also the first: Having the brand in all frames drives aided awareness
• Integrate early: Integrating the brand’s key position quickly leads to better message association
• Presence of a human/celebrity: Featuring a celebrity or brand ambassador enhances brand recall 
• Simple and clear messaging: Displaying easy-to-understand, succinct messages also help in higher recall

Including these simple practices helps generate an incremental impact on messaging and consideration for brand campaigns. For instance, data from ‘Disney+ Hotstar and Kantar’s Brand Lift Index Study for IPL 2020 campaigns’ showed the following results –   

Other effective guidelines

It isn’t just creative guidelines that make for an impactful campaign; a few media planning principles will also significantly increase your campaign’s effectiveness on live cricket. Here are some pointers: 

1. Ad length: Disney+ Hotstar and Kantar’s Brand Lift Index Study for IPL 2020 campaigns points to some interesting findings: Brands that take time to tell their entire story enjoy higher brand uplifts. The study also showed that the average uplift in brand metrics was around 7% for creatives that were 10 seconds long, which increases by 7% when the ad length increases to 11-20 seconds. It goes further up by 26% when the length of the ad exceeds 20 seconds or more.
2. Combining creatives: While planning a campaign, brands should combine 10-second creatives with an additional reel of 15-20 seconds for increased uplift as high as 50%.
3. Placement of creatives: Choosing the right combination of ad formats within a single campaign is key. The study shows that the average uplift of a campaign increases by over 30% when pre-rolls are used in combination with midrolls (as compared to just employing pre-rolls).

Planning a brand campaign well in advance will give advertisers more bang for their buck on live sports. Leveraging Disney+ Hotstar’s guidelines for effective creative campaigns will most definitely help brands achieve maximum eyeballs for their stories in the upcoming IPL 2021.