Why Indian Brands Still Buy Cricket
Indian advertising has spent two decades being told that mass audiences are over, that attention is fragmenting and that targeting is the future. Then the season starts and everyone queues up to buy cricket anyway.
The obvious explanation is habit, and habit is part of it. The more useful explanation is that cricket is the last reliable place in the Indian market where a brand can say one thing to a very large number of people at the same moment.
What a brand is buying when it buys cricket
Simultaneity, mostly. Digital delivers reach eventually; a match delivers it at once, which is what a launch, a price change or a category entry actually needs.
It also buys context that transfers. A brand seen during a national event is read as a brand of a certain size, and for challengers that perception shortcut is worth more than the impressions.
Why the argument about price never settles it
Because the alternatives are priced per impression and cricket is priced per moment, and the two cannot be compared on a spreadsheet without choosing which one the spreadsheet favours.
A performance team modelling cost per reach will always conclude it is expensive. A brand team looking for salience will always conclude it is the only thing that works. Both are reading the same buy against different jobs, and the argument recurs every year because nobody wins it.
What has actually changed
The formats around the game. Streaming turned a single national feed into many language feeds, which made regional buying possible at scale for advertisers who could never afford the whole audience.
And short-form clipping moved the value beyond the broadcast itself, so a sponsorship that was once measured in seconds of logo time is now measured partly in how much of the highlight economy it ends up inside.
The medium did not change. Its price and its packaging did, and the brands that get value from it are the ones that arrived with something to say rather than something to be seen at.