Daybreak - In the run-up to IPL, there's a conflict brewing between OTT platforms & advertisers

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

In November 2024,  one of India's biggest FMCG companies, Hindustan Unilever, started getting a barrage of complaints from its consumers, who said they were seeing the same Dove and Surf Excel ads repeatedly on OTT platforms during a single watch session. Some of them were shown the same ads as many as 150 times within a week. Now, with the IPL around the corner, HUL—which spends nearly Rs 4,000 crore on ads annually—couldn’t afford to ignore these complaints. So what followed was a series of investigations. And what they discovered has opened a real can of worms for not just JioHotstar, the platform that will be streaming the IPL, but OTT platforms in general. The big issue is a serious mismatch between what was promised and what’s actually being delivered for ad campaigns, according to seven insiders from HUL, Disney, and other industry rivals who spoke to The Ken. So what happens when a big spender starts feeling like it's not getting what it signed up for during the biggest streaming event of the year? The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan speaks to Daybreak hosts Snigdha and Rahel. Tune in. Listen to 'One Billion in 10 Minutes', our new mini series based on The Ken's inaugural case competition. The Ken app Apple Podcasts Spotify

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. IPL advertising has become a genre of its own. From way back in 2008, when the tournament began and we'd see these adorably funny Zuzu ads by Vodafone. All like this one by Sony Max that used to stream the tournament on television

way before OTT came into the picture. Now Savitri Brathe Gry Rathrake for Siams for. Raziya Charaak Roshan Karekarekarek to know. To now, like this cred ad featuring Rahul Dravid that went viral on social media. It's like saying Rahul Dravid has anger issues. Hey! That doesn't mean you can overtake.

Come, man, come. Could have gone straight and taken it. Indranagar's gunda I'm! Or this one by Dream 11. Ohya, where? BASME-BASS, ya. Your team bus is there. When Indian T20 league

comes, the wind has changed. Over the years, ever since IPL began, brands have been spending the big bucks to make ads specifically for the tournament. You've surely seen some of these ads over the years. And while we know that it is not so easy to tell on audio, but here's the thing that we're trying to say.

If you pay close attention, you will really realize that the nature of these ads have changed ever since OTT came into the IPL picture. Because OTTs offer brands things that TV couldn't. The chance to reach out to a more targeted audience. It's a more personalized experience. Plus, there's more flexibility and the outcomes are also way easier to measure. For example, this year alone, GeoHotStar is expecting to make $3,000 crore rupees in ad revenue from IPL. And it makes sense.

There is no other event in the country that garners the kind of eyeballs that IPL does. Last year, it reached nearly 7 million viewers on OTT alone. So, for brands, it's a once-in-a-year opportunity. Take Hindustan Unilever or HUL, for example. The FMCG giant is one of the biggest advertisers in the country and it spends nearly $4,000 crore rupees every year on ads. And out of that, this year, 100 crores at least is just for IPL.

It's the same for other brands, both big and small. All of them reserve a pretty big chunk of their annual ad budget just for IPL. So you understand how BCCI or the Board of Cricket Control of India and all these brands that advertise and the OTT platform, which is GeoHodestar right now, all work together for this monster money-making event to be a success. But recently, a fundamental flaw in this well-oiled machinery has got the attention of both advertisers and geo hot-star. It all started with HUL receiving a bunch of consumer complaints.

About what? We will give you a hint. It has something to do with the number of times you see an ad on an OTT platform. Welcome to another special episode of Daybreak. I'm Snigda and I'm Rahil. And once a week, Rahil and I come together to talk about about things in business and tech that interests the both of us. And it won't just be us.

Depending on what we're talking about, we will also be bringing a bunch of really interesting people on the podcast. In this week's episode, we were joined by our colleague, the Ken reporter, Ronak Kumar Kunjan. You know that IPL is like this insane time for advertisers, right? Like, just because of the sheer number of impressions that they get, you know, and the kind of viewership that it has. So, you know, I wanted to understand,

And is there some kind of a war that breaks out between brands, you know, before IPL, you know, to buy ad slots? Like, are there like a limited number of ad slots and there are too many brands fighting for space? Not exactly. So, what happens is these OTT platforms, Hot Star in this case, they come up with their ad rates. And those ad rates are floated across advertisers like PNG, H-UL, Swiggy, Credit. etc. So basically what these OTT platforms do is that they promise a certain number of impressions. So as long as they're hitting those impressions, the companies are absolutely fine with it. So it's not really a war sort of that happens. But yes, surely advertisers plan way in advance

before IPL months in advance. As we said a little while earlier, digital platforms fundamentally changed advertising. Back in the day when it was just TV and print ads, things were simpler, but also inefficient. These ads were seen by everyone and advertisers couldn't really choose their audiences. But with digital, there was so much scope for customization. Suddenly, advertisers were able to reach out to specific demographics and to understand who actually ends up watching their ads. And when an event like IPL went digital, advertisers for obvious reasons went crazy. Being seen during IPL could change a brand's trajectory. Okay. So, So, Ronak, what kind of money are we talking about here?

I mean, how much are these companies, you know, big and small, willing to pay for an ad slot on an OTT platform during IPL? For HUL, this year is planning to spend about rupees hundred crores, is what one of the sources told me. For a slightly smaller player, because HUL is one of the largest Indian advertisers out there. So they spending 100 crores is still understandable. But for a startup, like, say, Swiggy or, say, a cred,

anywhere between 30 to 40 crores is spent specifically on trying to advertise their products during IPL. Okay, but how much of their total ad budget actually goes towards this one event, you know, the IPL specifically, if we were looking at it just in percentage terms? It varies from every year. For instance, when Swiggy was very, very active with IPL ads, it was spending at about 20, 25 to 30% of its annual ad budget only for IPL. They don't give out these numbers. So these numbers are source-based.

And for somebody like CRED, because they went all out with their marketing, with their ads, the kind of people they hired for their ads, etc. So their marketing spends in terms of ads were already high. But even then, specifically for IPL, they were spending about 25% of their entire ad budget, one-fourth of it. Right. So, Ronak, you know, the ROI for these advertisers is huge, right? during the IPL. Let's take Tata Motors, for example,

they had the title sponsorship for last year's event. And I was reading newspaper reports, and they seemed really happy with the results. So can we talk about this a little bit? So I spoke to somebody who was part of Tata Motors when this IPL title sponsorship was happening. And he said that it's almost a Forex return. And not in terms of money,

but in terms of, say, user engagement, in terms of say inquiries, in terms of the attention that the kind of product that they're advertising it gets. So, and they said it's, there is no other event, life sports event or otherwise in India that gets the kind of attention that IPL does. Almost 7 million people watching it on their OTT platforms, similar numbers going to stadiums, etc. So obviously it's a high stakes event and it almost always works very well for advertisers as well. which is why the kind of preparation that goes about. So year after year, a large chunk of the overall ad budget for some of India's biggest brands is invariably yearmarked for the IPL.

But this year, the run-up to the IPL has not been smooth sailing. You see, there has been a growing tension between these advertisers and the OTT platform, which is GioHodestar in this case. It all began in the corporate office of Hindustan Union. Lever, one of India's largest FMCG companies. For context, this is the company that owns popular household staples like surf-exel detergent, Brookbond, Red Label tea and Lifeboy soap. Like we mentioned a little while ago, it also happens to be the country's top advertiser

across genres. In November 2024, HUL started receiving a barrage of complaints from its customers. Some of the users came up with complaints like they're seeing the same kind of ad over 150. 200 times in a week, which can be annoying for users. And that's when HUL took notice of it. And they wanted to find out what's wrong. With the IPL right around the corner, HUL could not afford to ignore these complaints. So what followed was a series of investigations.

And what HUL ended up discovering has opened a real can of worms for not just GEO Hot Star, but OTT platforms in general. So what they basically found through their third. party apps through their ad tech partners, etc. Is that frequency, as we said, was being optimized for and not reach. So a smaller group of users were being shown the same ad multiple number of times in order for the required number of impressions to be hit. And that's when they realized that also one of the reasons why they're not able to reach out

to as many people as they wanted to in the first place. We are going to pause right here to give you a quick look. lowdown on how this works. You can think of it sort of like digital advertising 101. So every time an advertiser and an OTT platform sign an ad contract, the platform promises a targeted impression count. Basically, an ad impression is nothing but a multiplication of two factors. One is the frequency of it and the other is reach. Frequency is the number of times an ad is shown to one user. And reach is the number of the number of. of users that ad is shown to.

So basically, frequency multiplied by reach is the number of impressions for that ad. So for instance, HUL would want a certain ad to have, say, a million impressions. But along with impressions, there is also a time frame to it. That, for instance, there will be five days by which the ad should reach a million impressions. Otherwise, there's no point to it, right? It cannot take six months for a million impressions. It will serve no purpose. Now, pretty much every marketer out there believes that the frequency of an ad should not be more than three

because the incremental value required to show the ad for the fourth, fifth or sixth time to the same user does not justify the cost involved with it. But what irked advertisers like Hindustan Unilever was that platforms like Hotstar were not following the rule of threes. Instead, they were very often spamming viewers with the same ad. So that's what they found out that instead of reach frequency is being optimized for by these OTT platforms. And further into the investigation, they realized that for a lot of these marketers, they don't even know that the problem is frequency and it is not the fact that, you know, impressions are being hit, etc.

because basically the biggest problem with OTT and web platforms is how they define a user, a unique user. So because these apps and these web platforms do not talk between each other, they assume that the same person who's moving from a web to an app platform are two different unique users. So basically the same number of ads are being shown again to the user when he's moving from a web platform to say an app platform. Right. But Ronan, this seems like a very technical issue, right? So, you know, is it fair to blame the OTT platform entirely for it? Or like, whose responsibility is it ultimately? It is the responsibility of the OTT platform. But the problem is that, for instance, TV ads took about 20, 25 years to be where they are. OTT for now hasn't got that kind of a time to mature. It really took off post the pandemic and then there was IPL, there were advertisers. There was so much money in work. So almost everybody that I spoke to for the story, who were from the advertiser side, they did have an empathetic side for DOTTs.

They said it's, I mean, it's not that what they've been doing is absolutely amazing. They should be very, very careful about it. But we should be giving them some more time before we, you know, sort of hold them completely responsible for it. Right, but that kind of begs a pretty fundamental question, right? Why not just fix it? So if platforms are currently optimizing for frequency over reach, Why not just change your tech stack to be able to do the opposite, right?

Why is that so hard for OTT platforms? So the biggest problem is that when an OTT platform promises a certain reach, say they promise a reach of a million a day, that's a very variable metric, right, and which cannot be controlled by the OTT platform. No OTT platform can absolutely, with complete conviction, predict that there will be one million users on my platform tomorrow. Of course, there can be averages from what they found out in the past, which is why the tweaking of reach and frequency begins.

And you're right, there is a tech stack problem as well, where the tech stack works in the favor of OTTs and not advertisers, and they look at device IDs a certain way. So, I mean, that's what the advertisers said. These are problems that we identify, but it will take some time to completely sort out all of these issues. There is no quick fix. That's what senior HUL executives learned after several meetings with Gio Hot Star officials. HUL told the KERN that it invests in ad tech on every campaign to avoid the problem of overexposure.

It also engages a bunch of other tools to track the frequency across OTT platforms. And if an OTT platform fails to meet its reach and frequency requirements, it pauses advertising with the platform. But with the IPL coming up, it isn't quite as straightforward a decision for any advertiser. So, you know, Ronak in a situation like this, will a company like Hindustan Unilu, in this case, you know, will they pause their partnership with you Hot Star or will they kind of cut their, or cut down their ad budget for the IPL? I want to understand what are the consequences of something like this, you know? So, Snigda, they can't really cut down on their advertising budget because IPL, as we spoke,

is the biggest event. They cannot afford to go slow there or go curbed or controlled there. They will be spending as much as they plan to spend. So just this month, Gio Hotstar announced that it was partnering with a global media audience measurement firm Nielsen to introduce third-party verified ad data starting with the upcoming IPL. The aim, simply put, was to amp up transparency in digital ad measurement. Because think about it, it's in everyone's.

best interest to arrive at a compromise in the situation. All of them need each other. But ultimately, it also boils down to who is more dependent on whom. But had there been no Nielsen, even if Hot Star would have said that nothing doing, we will continue working as we were. H2L still wouldn't have been able to sort of bring down their ad expenditure or their ad efforts during the IPL, because basically because of the kind of eyeball it attracts. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the newsroom of the newsroom.

Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. Head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by Rahal Philippos and I, Sinkda Sharma, and it was edited by Rajiv Sien.