JioStar's Winning Edge: Live cricket delivers 10.8x purchase intent boost

Introduction

What if your advertising could perform nearly eleven times better — simply by choosing the right environment? That's not a hypothetical. JioStar's newly released advertising playbook, The Winning Edge, built in collaboration with research giant Kantar, puts hard numbers behind what Indian marketers have long suspected: live cricket on JioStar isn't just reach — it's results. With data drawn from billions of impression-level touchpoints across marquee cricket properties, this playbook changes how serious brand builders should think about sports marketing in India. Here's the breakdown.

The big announcement

JioStar has launched The Winning Edge — India's first data-backed advertising playbook focused entirely on live cricket as a performance marketing platform. Developed alongside Kantar and validated through multiple Brand Lift Studies, the playbook moves beyond gut feel and historical precedent to deliver evidence-based guidance for brands at every stage of growth.

The headline numbers are striking. New brands advertising on live cricket via JioStar recorded up to 6.9 times higher brand awareness and up to 10.8 times higher purchase intent compared to Kantar's global benchmarks. Established brands also outperformed significantly — recording up to 4 times higher brand awareness and up to 4.9 times higher purchase intent.

Anup Govindan, Head of Sales, Sports at JioStar, captured the core finding clearly: live cricket creates a depth of attention and emotional engagement that produces a multiplier effect no non-live environment can replicate. Soumya Mohanty, MD and Chief Client & Solutions Officer at Kantar South Asia, reinforced this — noting that live cricket results consistently rank at the very top of Kantar's global Brand Lift database.

What this means for your brand

This playbook isn't just data — it's a media planning reset for every CMO in India.

Three findings deserve immediate attention from brand and agency leaders.

First, multi-screen activation is no longer optional. Brands running campaigns simultaneously across Linear TV, Connected TV, and mobile recorded up to 7 times higher purchase intent than single-platform advertisers — with less than 10% audience overlap across screens. That means each screen is delivering genuinely new audiences, not just repeating the same impression. For media planners still defaulting to TV-only or mobile-only buys, this is a direct challenge to that approach.

Second, sponsorships dramatically outperform inventory purchases. Brands with formal sponsorship arrangements saw up to 9 times higher purchase intent and up to 8 times higher ad awareness versus those simply buying spot inventory. In India, where cricket sponsorship has traditionally been viewed as a premium vanity play, this data reframes it as a measurable performance investment.

Third, combining video and display formats compounds results — brands running both formats saw up to 7.4 times higher brand awareness than those running video alone. For D2C brands and challenger marketers working with limited cricket budgets, this suggests format diversification delivers outsized returns relative to spend.

The contrarian view worth holding: data-backed playbooks are only as useful as the creative that runs within them. The numbers measure environment — they don't guarantee execution.

The numbers behind the news

The scale of live cricket's audience in India makes these multipliers even more significant in absolute terms. India's cricket viewership base runs into hundreds of millions, with IPL seasons consistently generating some of the highest single-event viewership figures in global sports broadcasting.

What The Winning Edge adds to this picture is specificity. The playbook identifies four in-match moments — Super 4s, Super 6s, DRS reviews, and Fall of Wickets — as disproportionately high-impact advertising windows. Brands that aligned their creative assets to these moments recorded salience uplifts between 4 and 9 times, awareness gains between 4 and 10 times, and brand recall improvements between 4 and 7 times compared to standard placements.

Brands that added pre- and post-live studio programming to their media mix saw an additional 2.1 times uplift in aided awareness — making extended presence around the match as valuable as presence during it.

The brands.in perspective

JioStar has done something genuinely useful here — and the industry should recognise it. Most media owners sell on reach and sentiment. JioStar has published a structured, Kantar-validated playbook that gives media buyers actual outcome benchmarks to plan against. That's a maturity shift in how Indian sports media is sold and bought. The risk, of course, is that the playbook becomes a sales document rather than a planning tool. Used honestly, it gives Indian brand managers a legitimate framework to evaluate cricket spend against business objectives — not just audience size. That's progress.

Key takeaways for marketers

• New brands on JioStar live cricket see up to 10.8x higher purchase intent vs benchmarks
• Multi-screen campaigns deliver up to 7x purchase intent over single-platform buys
• Sponsorships outperform inventory buys — up to 9x higher purchase intent
• High-impact match moments like Super 6s and DRS drive 4–10x awareness gains
• Combining video and display formats boosts brand awareness up to 7.4x

FAQ

What is JioStar's The Winning Edge playbook? It's India's first data-backed advertising guide for live cricket, developed with Kantar. It uses billions of impression-level data points and Brand Lift Studies to give brands and media buyers evidence-based recommendations for maximising campaign outcomes on live cricket.

Why do sponsorships perform better than spot inventory on live cricket? Sponsorships create sustained brand presence across the broadcast — before, during, and after key moments — rather than isolated interruptions. This extended exposure drives significantly higher ad awareness and purchase intent, as the JioStar-Kantar data consistently confirms.

Is live cricket advertising only effective for large brands with big budgets? No. The playbook covers brands across categories, budget sizes, and growth stages. Even challenger brands can benefit by focusing on high-impact moments, combining video with display, and activating across multiple screens to maximise incremental reach efficiently.

Let's talk

Does The Winning Edge change how your team thinks about cricket advertising — or does the creative still matter more than the platform? Share your perspective below, and follow brands.in for the brand intelligence that keeps Indian marketers one step ahead.