Ad Campaigns
Cricket fans score with second screens: Glance report
MUMBAI: Cricket enthusiasts across India are no longer content with merely watching the game—they’re demanding a richer, more immersive experience on their second screens. A new report from Glance, the world’s leading smart lock screen platform, has caught the digital behaviours of these sports-mad fans with their fingers firmly on their mobile devices.
Released yesterday in partnership with InMobi Advertising and AppsFlyer, the Decoding Indian Cricket Fans report lays bare how cricket has become less about passive viewing and more about active engagement across multiple screens.
During last year’s IPL tournament—a veritable religious experience for Indian sports fans—a whopping 120 million users turned to the Glance smart lock screen platform, driving engagement levels 2.4 times higher than normal periods. These smartphone-wielding enthusiasts spent 44 per cent more time consuming cricket-related content, generating an eye-watering 314 billion glances and 433 million taps.
“At Glance, we’re reimagining how consumers interact with their daily devices such as mobile lock screens and connected TVs, transforming them into more engaging screens and smarter surfaces,” says InMobi and Glance chief marketing officer Bikash Chowdhury clearly pleased as punch with the findings.
While English dominated content consumption at around 81 per cent, regional languages are staging a remarkable comeback. Hindi led the vernacular charge at 36.22 per cent, followed by Tamil (25.31 per cent), Kannada (15.35 per cent), Marathi (12.13 per cent) and Telugu (10.99 per cent)—suggesting cricket’s appeal transcends linguistic boundaries.
The report also reveals that 74 per cent of cricket content consumers use devices priced under Rs 30,000, making this a mass-market phenomenon rather than an elite pastime.
Cricket season isn’t just about runs and wickets—it’s about apps and clicks too. Last year’s tournament saw Android app installs surge by a hefty 35 per cent from pre-season to peak, while iOS installations jumped 28 per cent.
Gaming apps enjoyed click-through rates six times higher than normal periods, while home entertainment platforms saw rates 5.6 times higher. Cricket fans also proved themselves to be an advertiser’s dream, with 9.4 per cent more in-app clicks, 21 times higher video ad engagement, and full-screen interstitials delivering 13 times better performance than industry benchmarks.
“The intersection of cricket and digital engagement has never been more powerful,” says AppsFlyer, general manager Insea/ANZ Sanjay Trisal, clearly bowled over by the numbers. “This is a prime opportunity for brands—not just to reach audiences but to engage them meaningfully at high-intent moments.”
For marketers looking to cash in on cricket mania, the report offers a clear message: start early, target multiple screens, and don’t retire once the tournament ends. Remarketing strategies should be timed according to category, with entertainment and food delivery apps performing best mid-season, while finance and investment apps hit their stride after the final whistle.
As the report aptly concludes: “As with a good shot, timing is everything.”
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
