AD Agencies
Advertisers to spend $66 bn on sponsorship this year: WARC report
MUMBAI: Advertisers are expected to spend a combined $66 billion on sponsorship this year, though fewer than one in five are confident that they can actually measure the business value return of the sponsorships they undertake.
According to WARC’s recent report on global ad trends, sponsorship growth is trending ahead of most paid media, and $66 billion is expected to be invested this year which will mostly be on sports properties.
Brand spend on sponsorship which is inclusive of rights but excluding activation is expected to rise by 4.9 per cent to reach $65.8 billion worldwide this year.
Sponsorship is growing faster than all paid media channels excluding internet formats.
North America makes up the greatest share of spend at 36.8 per cent or $24.2 billion, followed by Europe at 26.7 per cent or $17.6 billion, Asia-Pacific at 25.2 per cent or $16.6 billion, Latin America at 7.0 per cent or $4.6 billion, and then the Middle East and Africa at 4.3 per cent or $2.8 billion.
Most of this money is going to sports properties. Among these are the FIFA World Cup in Russia, which is thought to have attracted $1.7billion worth of deals. At a time of fragmentation, sport offers large, engaged, multiscreen audiences. By volume of data, the 2018 FIFA World Cup was the most-streamed sporting event in history. TV is still king for live sporting events, with World Cup matches reaching 44 per cent of the global population via television.
Sponsorships are principally used to drive brand metrics and reach.
Generating brand awareness is the most important objective for sponsorship campaigns. This mirrors separate WARC research in this year’s WARC 100 that found 61 per cent of successful campaigns counted brand awareness as a core objective. This suggests sponsorship plays the same role as mass-reach media, fitting into the ‘upper-funnel’ of a marketing plan (generating awareness and consideration).
Sponsors rely on intermediate metrics; true ROI remains a challenge.
Only 19 per cent of sponsorship professionals are confident that they can actually measure the business value return of the sponsorships they undertake. Further, only 37 per cent of practitioners have a standardised process for measuring sponsorship.
The top two named tools used for evaluation are digital and social media metrics. However, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) states that social media metrics often provide a distracting noise due to their weak relationship to sales.
Social Media and live events power sponsorship activation.
Social is considered the number one activation channel for sponsorships by 83 per cent of marketers. However, the prevailing sentiment is that authentic engagement of sponsorship, through digital and social activation, remains a challenge.
Possibly by way of remedy, the share of marketers activating sponsorships through experiential live events has risen to two-thirds (65 per cent) over the last year.
WARC data editor James McDonald said, “As brands continue to jostle for a finite amount of consumer attention, the changing way in which media is consumed has led to the fragmentation of audiences. Yet sports generate an engaged, mass audience which sponsors can reach, before amplifying their campaigns via social media and experiential events.”
Sponsorships facilitate the upper part of the sales funnel – driving brand awareness and consideration – in much the same way as TV. This can present challenges, however, such as the knowledge gap between brand impact and sales impact.
AD Agencies
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.
