"With 'Believe In Blue' we want to galvanise fans-support towards the Indian team": Sanjog Gupta

This is the beginning of the home season and so, you are setting the agenda for what the next few months of India's bilateral cricket are going to be. Just as the openers are in a batting lineup, this is a critical campaign. For us, it is more than a campaign. It is a call to action for fans of team India to rally behind this team that has delivered so much joy and cause for celebration over the years. Setbacks are a part and parcel of any journey. The way that we thought about 'Believe In Blue' is that it will be a journey instead of a campaign.

This is a journey of faith in our men in blue that they will bounce back from the disappointment of the T-20 World Cup and emerge stronger. 'Believe In Blue' is an attempt at building a continuing narrative across the calendar of events that we have. India is playing a lot of bilateral cricket over the next few months before the IPL and will continue till the T-20 World Cup which is going to be in October-November 2022. We wanted to have a continuing narrative that strings together each of these series as a means of keeping fans engaged and taking them on a journey with us to ensure that they are cheering for team India at every juncture.

It is difficult to isolate the impact of the campaign on viewership. There is no scientific way for us to say what the viewership number would have been if the campaign was not launched. What I can say is 'Believe In Blue' played a part in reorienting the fans-sentiment. It brought upfront the feeling that the 'Men In Blue' need the fans now more than ever and the best way of backing them is to cheer for them as they play, either from the stands or by sitting in front of the screens. The narrative helped fans set aside the feeling of disappointment that had grown during the course of the T20 World Cup with India's early exit.

The way that we like to engage with fans is with narratives that cut across all formats. Having said that, 'Believe In Blue', at least, the way we want to express, was more about India's limited-overs journey than Test Cricket. India's performance in Test Cricket continues to remain strong. With 'Believe In Blue' we want to galvanise fans-support towards the Indian team when it plays white-ball cricket. There is a journey ahead of us with India playing the T-20 World Cup in 2022 and then the One Day International World Cup in 2023. 'Believe In Blue' sets us off on that journey.

We will make 'Believe In Blue' an integral part of our coverage. That applies to the programming we do. We have a show called 'Follow The Blues' which is all about the Indian Cricket Team and its journey. Also, make it a part of our live coverage with how we treat each loss and each win which is a part of the larger narrative. The idea is to have multiple touchpoints for 'Believe In Blue' both while the series and live coverage is on and also when there are gaps between series.

It is a challenge as well as an opportunity. It allows you to engage with fans with new messaging, engage with fans that you have not engaged with before and potentially deepen the engagement with fans who are already connected with the game and the network. If you look at 'Mauka Mauka' the genesis of the campaign in 2015 came from a cricket context that India has never lost against Pakistan in a World Cup. It was a cricket narrative that provided the germ of an idea that 'Mauka Mauka' became. The expression was from the point of view of a Pakistani fan.

The second context is a consumer context - an insight or a consumer truth that we believe will enable the campaign with a certain cohort of consumers and bring them in. For example, the 'Sabse Bada Moh' campaign which translates to 'The Biggest Desire'. The consumer insight here was that there are many casual fans out there who will miss a lot of cricket all throughout the year but will make sure that they don't miss this one game - the India versus Pakistan match.

The third is the social context and the most recent example is the 'Ek Saath Wali Baat' which was our campaign for the IPL. We were all living in confinement, physically distanced, were dealing with the tragic loss that all of us experienced directly or indirectly during the pandemic. 'Ek Saath Wali Baat' was an expression of how cricket has the ability to bring us together socially even when are physically distanced. All of our campaigns are designed to deliver on one or more of these contexts.

The context for 'Mauka Mauka' has always been that India has never lost to Pakistan in the World Cup. The campaign was designed to deliver expression that there was a desire amongst Pakistani fans to at least get on the board. As soon as the Cricket context ended, effectively it meant the ending of that campaign. So, it was not driven by the backlash or sentiment but the cricket narrative which was that India had never lost to Pakistan in World Cups. The campaign had to end as it is practically impossible for India to keep winning against Pakistan in World Cups forever. It happened in 2021 in the T-20 World Cup and that was the reason 'Mauka Mauka' campaign came to a logical conclusion.

It is a question that has been asked so many times and the answer lies in two parts. One is what is the ambition that we have with cricket - what do we want the sport to be? And the second part is - what do we believe is the right way of engaging with fans. If the ambition is to continue growing cricket and inviting new fans to come and engage with the game or a property or a series, then there has to be a compelling invitation for that fan to feel compelled to come and watch. This may be a consumer cohort that is currently not engaging with cricket as deeply as we want to, or it could be a cohort that we want to expand.

For example, there might be a cohort that watches a certain number of minutes and matches and we want to grow it further to ensure they are watching more matches and minutes. So, we will go out there to create as many compelling invites for this cohort to engage more often and more deeply with matches, series and seasons.

The second objective is to recruit new fans as they come into the fold of television viewership. The total number of television viewers is growing year on year, which means there are always viewers you are trying to attract to the sport and to the channel. To that end, you will also identify cohorts that are watching television but not cricket - could be the young kids, certain segments of the female audience, the male audience who are not watching a particular format of cricket... In the case of IPL, we have made focussed attempts at attracting 10-12-year-olds to watch cricket by creating a parallel viewing experience which was called 'Super Funday'. The reason why we create campaigns is in a bid to retain the fans and to recruit new fans to grow the overall size of the viewership.

The insight is that a significant proportion of fans who watch ISL, PKL are actually also fans who watch a lot of cricket. So, a fairly large segment of the Kabaddi and Football viewing population are actually viewers who watch a lot of cricket. The cricket fans are adopting a second or a third sport and that is a fairly significant chunk. We would like to migrate a lot of fans from one sport to the other, a viewer who is watching cricket, their propensity to consume another sport is much higher than the entertainment viewer who is not watching any sport including cricket.