World Cup hits viewership of non-sports genres, advertising on TV, OTT

livemint.com:

NEW DELHI : Airing of prime cricket property—the World Cup, preceded by the Asia Cup—has resulted in a dent in viewership and advertising for non-sports channels on television as well as streaming platforms. And the dent is sizeable. “Cricketing data available for 10 weeks, excluding the last week of the World Cup, compared with the previous 10-week period of non-cricketing months, shows that the sports genre GRPs increased by almost 322%, all dominated by cricket," said Chandrashekhar Mantha, partner, media and entertainment sector leader, Deloitte India.

He added that overall GRPs saw a near 17% drop on TV during the cricketing season, while GRPs of general entertainment channels, or GECs, fell 19%, movies 25%, and news, 24%. GRPs stand for gross rating points, a standard to measure advertising impact. Media buyers say non-sporting channels usually see 8-10% year-on-year growth in advertising during the festive quarter, but that may have grown only 5% this time.

Further, even though OTT streaming platforms are not driven by appointment viewing, they still saw an overall impact on consumption, particularly on days when India was playing. However, when the game paused, OTT services bounced back. “There was a 15-20% impact (on viewership) during high points of the matches.

At the same time, there was a significant surge before and after, balancing the previous impact," Soumya Mukherjee, chief operating officer at Bengali streaming service hoichoi said. Cricket advertising expenditure this year is in the range of ₹8,000 crore– ₹10,000 crore. Typically, marquee events such as IPL (Indian Premier League) and the World Cup take up a big chunk of it, Rammohan Sundaram, president, integrated media, DDB Mudra Group said.