This is a deep dive from the The Olympics Masterclass on the strong comms offerings that JioCinema will provide advertisers and maketers during the Olympics, and we bring it to you from the engaging session Hall of Fame by Chandan Roy, AVP, Revenue Management, which was presented by Sports18 and JioCinema.
To bring you the context unfiltered, we bring you Chandan’s words, slightly edited where required. We believe this will help marketers looking to advertise on The Olympics on Sports18 and JioCinema, so go ahead. Read on, and start planning now:
The Olympics – A global extravaganza with a scale to match
If we talk about the scale, The Olympics are bigger than the United Nations, United Nations has 193 member countries, Olympics has 206. If you think about it, it’s actually 45 sporting leagues rolled into one, there are about 35 sports and 45 disciplines, more than 10,000 athletes come with the best of their preparation of decades, just to win that one medal or one round, reaching out to more than half the population of the world. It is as global as it can get.
And the statements that you’re seeing is what sets the Olympics apart from other sporting events, as well as any event in general.
And that’s why this statement that, you may be a champion in your respective sport, but what makes you a legend is success at the Olympics. And these are just couple of athletes. But if you look at the biggest and the best athletes in the history of sports, everybody expresses the same desire or the same feeling about winning a medal at the Olympics.
And I think that any sports person or whoever took up sports, it’s not possible that person would not have thought of competing at the Olympics. That’s the kind of desire and aspiration Olympics brings to athletes.
This is the first time that a digital streaming platform (JioCinema) has the rights for both – IPL and Olympics at the same time.
On JioCinema, 17 days, 26th July to 11th August 2024, a total of 23 feeds — five curated and 18 direct as they come from the Olympics, in four language options: English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
You will have the Olympics on the JioCinema homepage, you can look at the full schedule, it will tell you where India will be competing, and much more including the
Medal tally which is one of those things that people keep coming and checking out, in case they don’t happen to be watching the live sport.
Advertising options
The Olympics obviously has some very unique and large advertising options because it allows an advertiser to be where everybody wants to be. It makes sure that you get the lion’s share of visibility. The Winning Moment, where the brand will be seen when some of the biggest athletes and teams secure victories.
Medal Tally Branding will give brands the opportunity to be visible on the medal tally on JioCinema with a promo playout.
Schedule Branding will all allow brands to be visible on the schedule section of the Paris Olympics 2024.
Super Start features a brand promo before the start of a sport and includes certain India specific moments too.
Goals Galore branded features will play out during the high points including popular sports like Football and Hockey.
Super Saves will be played during the high points of popular team sports like Football and Hockey.
Enduring Rallies – branded features will play out during the long rallies of popular sports like Tennis and Badminton.
VAR will have branded features that will play out during the reviews taken across Football, Hockey, Tennis and Badminton.
Team Huddle will play out during team huddles like Football, Hockey, Basketball and Volleyball.
Daily Pass will feature impactful presence on a day and assets of the brand’s choice.
Olympics promotions by JioCinema
Our initial period from 18th April to 18th May 2024 was more to just promote the destination, dates etc. Now the second phase 19 May to July 7, where we’re trying to build affinity – athletes and the Indian contenders and sport specific affinity. You will see multiple promos coming where we are trying to make sure that we at large are aware of our athletes and why they are medal contenders.
We realized that sports viewers at large in our country still remain more interested around cricket so there’s obviously that much excitement and interest around cricket. So we realized why not use a cricketer to build affinity for non-cricketers. So we created a show it’s called Get Set Gold where Dinesh Karthik happens to be the host or the anchor. And he challenges the top four Olympic contenders or better contenders from India and spends a day each with four of them. It will start on a humorous note where he says that how difficult it can be to throw a javelin at some distance or just throw punches or play badminton perfectly — how difficult it can be, and how he finds out the hard way that it’s not easy. That could be a great piece of content.
And then of course, towards the business end, we’ll start our mass media campaign to rally people to watch and support as much as possible.
Barrier-‘Free’ streaming
With 275 million average monthly active during non-IPL months speaking of the fan engagement that JioCinema has to offer.
Sports tent poles like the Olympics, IPL, FIFA, were always thought of as being after subscriptions. We obviously changed that game and made them barrier-free for every single viewer.
And we have an almost-275 million average monthly active users number on JioCinema, and this is from the non-IPL period. Currently in India, as per BARC and multiple other researchers, there are more than 900 million-plus sports viewers. No surprises, majority of them watch cricket. 850 million-plus are cricket viewers, but the surprise is that almost more than half of them actually watch other sports as well over 500 million which is a very encouraging sign for us. And therefore on the back of this, we are hoping to change the game. When it comes to the digital consumption of Olympics. (Source: Live Sports viewers from BARC Internet in India 2023 – Kantar Report)
JioCinema aspires to make this the Most Watched Olympics yet
TV Reach is expected to be at 100 million but the actual game changer is going to be the Olympics on digital. Because it’s the first time it’s going to be on digital and JioCinema is looking at 150 million. That’s massive. Just to give you a perspective, it used to range around 10 to 15 million till the last time. That’s the real effort (and incremental delta).
Fan Engagement with multiple feeds
Because it’s almost like 45 sporting leagues rolled into one – that makes the coverage of the broadcast that much more complex.
So, it was a huge task to figure out how we are going to show it to people given that somebody will come for just medals, somebody will come just to see the India medal somebody will just come to see a global athlete.
So, what we have done is we have curated old feeds roundup of which the main one will be the India feed, which will be available in English and Hindi with two parallel studios running at any given time. It will focus on one of course India participation and second other sports where India is represented, may not be playing at that moment. But focus on that and some other big athletes and sports.
Then the other feed will be a global sports feed, which will focus on medal events in other sports, and bigger athletes, big sports.
Women-Centric Feed
This will essentially focus on women in action. So again, I think Olympic sports are a bit of an outlier because this is one event where the women athletes, I wouldn’t say outperform, but in a way have outperformed the male athletes. The medal contenders, as well as winners always have come from the women athletes mode. We’re expecting a lot of our women athletes to do well. Therefore, what we have done is we’ve also created a feed which will focus just on the women athletes, women athletes from India, and as well as women athletes in general as well.
Artistic Sports Feed
Fourth is more of an experiment, because there are certain sports, which fall into a very different category. Like figure skating, artistic swimming, gymnastics where you can just watch those sports. So these are the curated four feeds that we’ll have.
18 concurrent feeds
And then from Olympic directly, we have 18 concurrent feeds, which are more like a superset, which cover all the 45 sporting disciplines being played. At that point of time. What we will do at our end is we’ll keep changing the icons of those thumbnails to depict whatever sport is live at that point.
