MAM
Adjust and Glance unite to unveil ‘The Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers’
Mumbai: As India gears up for another exciting cricket season, marketers and advertisers across India are set to gain invaluable insights from the report titled ‘The Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers’, jointly presented by mobile marketing analytics platform Adjust and one of the world’s leading Smart Lock Screen platforms, Glance. It is a guide for growth marketers who want to leverage this opportunity for mobile advertising, providing a unique avenue to deliver delightful consumer experiences.
The report covers trends and insights on user behavior and content consumption during the cricket season and best practices for engaging with cricket enthusiasts especially on smart surfaces. It encourages growth marketers to embrace artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate personalised content at scale, tailor user experiences, drive efficiencies and measure success. Employing device-based attribution models will improve accuracy, minimise ad fraud and maximise returns on campaign spends.
InMobi Group chief business officer Vasuta Agarwal said, “Owing to soaring costs during this sporting tournament, mobile becomes a preferred, innovative and lucrative medium for advertisers compared to traditional platforms. In fact, 73 per cent of IPL viewers tuned into the tournament digitally last year, and 30 per cent prefer watching it solely on mobile. The advent of smart surfaces like the Glance smart lock screen that facilitate effortless app downloads with a single tap is a game changer. We are glad to share these insights with the marketing community in collaboration with an industry partner like Adjust.”
Cricket fans are diverse, tech-savvy and highly engaged on their mobile devices and use it as the second screen for live match updates, browsing, ordering and socializing. They consume content in various languages and formats and prefer it to be instant and seamless.
Glance revealed interesting smart lock screen insights based on the 128 million users that tuned in for periodic updates of India’s favorite cricket tournament in 2023. The platform received 2.6 times higher engagement on video with a distinct surge in activity in the second half of the day, and 35 per cent of cricket content engagement came from vernacular languages. 70 per cent of cricket viewers were Gen Z and millennials, 65 per cent were male, 30 per cent were aged 45 plus and 55 per cent were from tier-I cities. While the highest cumulative engagement came from the South Indian region, Delhi, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh were the most engaged states.
According to Adjust data, the country’s most popular sporting season drives higher app installs, session lengths and retention rates for various app categories, especially streaming, news, gaming, e-commerce, and food delivery. Compared to the overall 2023 daily install average during the IPL season, mobile apps overall and streaming apps witnessed 13 per cent and 45 per cent greater installs respectively. Streaming apps saw the longest session lengths, with the average session length having increased from 20.24 minutes to 32.48 minutes. The largest retention was in games, up three percentage points from 21 per cent to 24 per cent.
“Adjust empowers marketers to navigate the dynamic landscape of mobile advertising with confidence and precision. Our robust measurement solutions enable marketers to seamlessly evaluate user quality across diverse acquisition channels, including innovative platforms like Glance. With Adjust’s comprehensive user lifecycle tracking and innovative products like incrementality, marketers can unlock the full potential of their campaigns, harnessing the power of tentpole sporting events to drive growth and maximize ROI. Together with Glance, we’re shaping the future of app marketing, delivering actionable insights and best practices to fuel success in the competitive mobile landscape,” added Adjust director of partnerships – APAC Ajit Pawar.
As per the report, marketers should consider the context and content of their campaigns to connect with cricket fans, strategizing for before, during and after matches. They should also explore new formats and channels such as polls, quizzes, interactive units and smart lock screens to create immersive, interactive and engaging experiences.
Six tips for marketers to maximise success during the cricket season:
1. Enable seamless app installs on the first mobile touchpoint.
2. Tap into match moments to create intuitive experiences and re-engage consumers.
3. Enable discovery with a single tap to let fans get your app and their content before they unlock their phones.
4. Stay present and relevant throughout the cricket season.
5. Focus on data-driven decision-making by measuring success and observing usage trends,
6. Understand the assisting influence of various channels to drive conversion.
To read more about The Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers, visit https://inmo.bi/3wVmlYS
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
