MAM
ESP Properties: Sports and entertainment trends 2019
MUMBAI: ESP Properties, GroupM’s sports and entertainment marketing agency announced its Top Sports and Entertainment Trends for 2019 on 26 February 2019.
ESP Properties India business head Vinit Karnik said, “2019 will be a year for sports and entertainment. With Cricket on our minds for more than half the year, brands would want to revolve their game around the sport and the athletes. While e-sports is also becoming big, it has come a long way, and it is only expected to get bigger. With almost 20 per cent of share of spend expected in digital, ad spends in sports and entertainment marketing is expected to grow and evolve.”
Cricket to dominate media and mind measures in 2019
Cricket is in full swing in H1 2019 with Team India moving bases from Australia to New Zealand post the ODI series and following it up with hosting Australia in February to play ODI’s & T20’s. Then comes Vivo IPL and ICC Cricket World Cup, making Virat Kohli and his boys the talk of the town for the first six months in 2019 and literally monopolizing consumer eyeballs and advertising money. 2019 will break all records of cricket consumption on TV and Digital. With the ICC World Cup in England & Wales and considering our love for London, Indians will break all worldwide records of traveling overseas to watch sports and boost the sports tourism economy. With such a start to the year dominated by cricket, emerging leagues may have to reset themselves to make their presence felt and stay relevant.
Embrace the athlete, embrace their stories
One of the biggest marketing trends of this year is storytelling and we expect talent to unlock maximum value in 2019. Sporting landscape, led by cricket, will see the true value of talent beyond the top cricketers being unlocked. Audiences not only want to be taken on a journey, but they also want to connect with brands. Brands which can use Athlete and their storytelling power will garner massive interest from fans and advertisers owing to mass media exposure via TV and one-to-one engagement through social communities, rediscovering their true value. Federations and leagues will carefully evaluate talent contracts in terms of talent usage rights for self, sponsor activation and scope of the engagement. With social media becoming the primary engagement platform, the right balance between personal and public imagery will be most talked and debated in 2019. One can’t rule out a policy for talent on national duty for social media engagements and media appearances. This space will be super exciting in 2019, hence watch this space closely…
Definition of ‘sellable’ content to be rejigged by newer monetization models
Experimental content is facing challenges to release in large scale formats like cinemas. With newer digital platform and content taking center stage, storing telling will be redefined with a lot of experimentation and fresh feel. For example, content series like Lust Stories and Love, Per Square Foot has managed to harvest a completely new group of audience via digital only release. This trend is expected to continue with many more such content prices seeing a ray of hope to see the light of day.
Broadcasting platforms to lean on data-driven insights and player access to engage and build fans
While traditional broadcast passed on Gold Standards of Content from linear to non-linear platforms, best practices in Consumer Engagement will move from non-linear to linear platforms. For example, Watch ‘n’ Play on Hotstar during Vivo IPL 2018 has redefined Consumer Engagement norms for the traditional linear broadcaster(s) to follow. Moreover, increasing insistence on player access as a ‘Sponsorship Right’ in the sporting ecosystem is bound to blur lines of personal endorsements. With professional sporting ecosystem in India being over a decade old, advertisers have started looking at ‘Sponsorship’ as a one-stop solution to media exposure and talent access.
Mobile Gaming to take center stage in the competitive CPU dominant Professional E-Sports World
Globally, professional E-sport competitions are primarily held on a computer and consoles and mobiles take a backseat. In India, we’re witnessing a different trend where tournaments being held on the mobile, courtesy – PUBG on mobile with DAU of approx. 10mn+ which is more than any other game in the world across any platform is already giving gamers in India almost half the prize money of an E-Sports League India and this is only going to further grow. There will be so many more mobile E-Sport tournaments which will be seen in the coming future.
Brands
Boeing appoints Barun as head of FP&A for global engineering function
Seasoned finance leader to steer budgets and strategy across global centres
BENGALURU: Boeing’s finance cockpit has a new pilot, and he is no stranger to turbulence or transformation. Boeing has appointed Barun as head of FP&A for global engineering, placing him at the centre of financial strategy for its worldwide engineering and technology operations.
Based in Bengaluru, Barun steps into a role that is as expansive as it is critical. He will serve as the primary finance lead for Boeing’s Engineering and Technology Centers globally, working closely with executive leadership to shape financial decisions, manage complex budgets, and design scalable finance processes that support the company’s growing engineering footprint.
In a note announcing his move Barun said, “I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Boeing Global Engineering. This opportunity is incredibly meaningful to me not just from a professional standpoint, but also for what Boeing represents globally.” He added that he looks forward to contributing to an organisation that continues to shape the future of aerospace and innovation.
Barun’s mandate spans strategic financial leadership, operational oversight, and stakeholder engagement. From directing large-scale budgets and schedules to influencing long-term organisational goals, the role blends financial discipline with business foresight. He will also lead cross-functional teams and partner with finance colleagues worldwide to support engineering programmes across geographies, including India.
The appointment caps a long stint at Juniper Networks, where Barun spent over a decade, most recently as finance senior manager. There, he led FP&A for global product business units and G&A functions, driving budgeting, forecasting, and long-range planning. He also played a key role in enterprise-wide transformation, including spearheading an Oracle to SAP ERP migration and building advanced analytics capabilities using tools such as Tableau and SAP Analytics Cloud.
His earlier career includes finance leadership roles at Sony India Software Centre, Cognizant Technology Solutions, and Mphasis, where he focused on financial planning, governance frameworks, and operational efficiency across global delivery centres.
A chartered accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Barun brings nearly two decades of experience across financial planning, digital transformation, and analytics-led decision making.
His appointment comes at a time when global engineering operations are becoming increasingly complex and distributed, requiring sharper financial oversight and agile planning. With Barun at the helm of FP&A for engineering, Boeing appears to be tightening its financial playbook as it looks to scale innovation with discipline.
