Published on: May 7, 2026
The IPL changed Indian advertising the moment it launched. It gave brands a legitimate stage, glamour, drama, volume and for a decade, showing up was enough. Then screens multiplied. Then second-screening became the norm. Then the algorithm made every user’s thumb a ruthless editor. The era of passive brand presence during live sport eroded, season by season, until the gap between a brand’s media spends and a consumer’s actual recall became too wide to ignore comfortably. What fills that gap is not more creative. It is better interaction. Interactive ads and immersive rich ad formats that ask something of the audience. Campaigns that live on the device already in every fan’s hand.
Fans during an IPL match are always leaning forward, toggling between the broadcast and their group chat, checking fantasy scores, offering opinions nobody asked for and receiving opinions nobody needed.
“The mobile screen, in this context, is not a second screen. It is the primary theatre of emotional expression.”
A brand that understands this stops thinking about how to appear in that theatre and starts thinking about how to give the audience something to do. The distinction sounds philosophical. Its commercial consequences are entirely practical.
One good thing in 2026 is that brands truly seem to be done with passive ad formats. Not because of a creative awakening, but because these formats simply stopped driving any real business impact. The interactive ad formats getting the most attention right now include things like sensory advertising, ads that won’t unlock until the fan physically cheers into their phone. Noise threshold, microphone picks it up, message unlocks. The first reaction from most media planners is, what if they’re watching alone? Fair. But that’s an execution question, not a conceptual one.
“The actual idea, that a brand waits for the fan instead of ambushing them, is genuinely different from how advertising has worked for the last twenty years.”
Worth paying attention to even if the logistics aren’t perfect yet.
AR is interesting because it’s been interesting for a decade and mostly disappointing. Too many immersive rich ad experiences that needed a separate app, three steps, and patience that nobody has during an IPL match. What’s different now is simpler, the friction is lower, the integration is tighter, and brands have stopped trying to wow people and started trying to include them instead. Fans bowling in their living rooms, batting in the space between the sofa and the wall. The memory created isn’t exactly a brand memory. It’s more physical than that. And physical memories are harder to scroll past later.
The AI chatbot space is where it gets interesting. AI versions of cricketers, trained on match history, on how the player actually speaks, on specific moments fans would ask about, are letting people have conversations that feel close enough to real to matter. And the slightly uncomfortable truth is that they work partly because fans want them to. Hundreds of millions of people in this country have grown up with a completely one-directional relationship with players they feel like they know personally. The chatbot doesn’t close that gap. It just makes it feel slightly smaller for a few minutes. Turns out that’s enough.
Quizzes keep getting treated like the budget option, the thing you do when you can’t afford the AR or the chatbot. But the numbers don’t support that. Interactive ad formats, proper ones that actually test knowledge rather than just flatter the fan, are driving better product recommendation rates than standard ads. The reason is almost embarrassingly straightforward: people recommend things that make them feel something. Getting a hard question right during a drinks break, knowing the obscure stat your group chat didn’t, that’s a feeling. A pre-roll that autoplayed while you were checking your fantasy score is not.
The part that’s least exciting to talk about but probably matters most is relevance. India’s cricket market is growing at over 10% annually through 2031. Everyone knows this, most decks open with it, and it tells you almost nothing useful about whether your campaign will land. A bigger audience is also a less patient one, more opinionated, more specific about what feels relevant, quicker to dismiss what doesn’t. The fan watching their team need 40 off 3 overs is somewhere completely different emotionally from the fan watching a dead rubber on a Tuesday night. Same person sometimes. A completely different person for advertising purposes, always.
The takeaway across all of it is simple: passive formats are losing, interactive and immersive rich ad formats are winning, not because they’re newer, but because they give fans something to do with the emotion the match has already created in them.
“The IPL is not a media property. It’s an emotion that happens to have a broadcast schedule.”
Somewhere in Mumbai right now, someone’s rearranging their evening plans around a match that, on paper, doesn’t even affect the standings. They’re not thinking about brands. They’re thinking about the batting order and whether their group chat has already started without them.
That person, distracted, opinionated, completely absorbed, is every marketer’s best possible audience. Not because they’re available. But because they’re alive in a way that most advertising environments spend millions trying to manufacture and never quite pull off.
In a tournament this charged, one genuine moment of interaction is worth more than a thousand impressions that nobody asked for, and nobody remembers. The match will take care of the emotion. Your only job is to give the fan somewhere to put it.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the publication or organization.
