With two marquee cricket tournaments — Asia Cup and ICC World Cup — around the corner, Disney Star is gearing up to garner strong reach and grab a major chunk of the festival season ad spend by brands.

Sources said the broadcaster is targeting a cumulative potential reach of over 800 million viewers over the next three months across TV and digital. Matches of Asia Cup and ICC World Cup would be available free-to-view to all mobile phone users accessing Disney+ Hotstar. The ICC World Cup in 2019 reached about 552 million viewers on TV as per BARC data.

Ajit Varghese, Network Ad Sales, Disney Star, told businessline,” Over the last year, we have seen ratings of live cricket on television going up by 30-50 per cent across formats. Viewing time for live cricket matches has also seen significant growth. So, we are targeting an unprecedented reach maximisation across TV and digital.”

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With its free-to-view AVOD strategy for mobile, the broadcaster aims to make Disney+ Hotstar the leading online video platform by reaching a majority of India’s 550 million digital video audience.

Responding to a query on brands sentiment on ad expenditure, he said, “Over the past 12 months, businesses have been making adjustments to tide over the macroeconomic headwinds. Now, we see the start of a positive revival cycle. We see an uptick in ad spends in categories such as FMCG, auto sector, e-commere, mobility and fintech. So, we are garnering a strong interest from brands for these marquee cricket properties across categories,”

In a bid to grow the base of advertisers, the broadcaster is offering flexible and customised ad package options across TV and digital. “We have decided to offer competitive pricing options so every brand irrespective of scale and size can come on board. For the very first time, we are offering marquee cricket properties at user-content generated (UGC) rates so any brand can shift their budgets to live cricket,” Varghese said.

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On digital, it is offering nearly 75 plus advance targeting options such as geographical targeting, geo-targeting or interest-based targeting through multiple ad packages option.

Disney+ Hotstar will also soon be launching a self-serve platform to make advertising on live cricket more accessible. “A large set of advertisers have been added to the ecosystem in the past few years with the growth of digital platforms. So we want to make live sports more accessible to these video advertisers through this platform and are also offering incentivised packages for first-time advertisers,” he added.

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