Cricket fever meets festive fervour: Unleash the potential of AI ad optimization

Authored By: Vishal Singh, Country Head - India 

The festive season in India is a month-long affair wherein meeting family and friends, and giving them gifts is a part of the celebrations. During these auspicious festivities, users also tend to make purchases as their sentiments encourage them. This is why, during this time, most e-retailers offer attractive shopping deals and brands offer enticing discounts. Now combine this with one of the most popular sports in India, Cricket whose World Cup falls right in the middle of the festive season and most cricketers are brand ambassadors for major products, the sway of audience attention is like no other. 

So, when two major events of the year are colliding, how can brands effectively captivate user attention and mark their brand presence? The answer is Artificial Intelligence! Over the past year, AI has revolutionized the internet and continues to stride ahead. Its market size is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2023-2030) of 19.99%, resulting in a market volume of US$14.72 bn by 2030 since it has also become a game-changer in the digital advertising landscape (source: Statista). 

Here’s how marketers can harness the power of AI to target the "right" audience during this festive season.

In 2022, the festive season sales on e-commerce platforms grew by a staggering 5.4X and are projected to multiply this year (source: Your Story). Consumers are expected to flock to online marketplaces since their sentiments during festivities and cricket matches often seem at par. The colliding of both events presents a significant opportunity for brands, as it will lead to a surge in online consumerism, encompassing both online shopping and video consumption.

With videos being considered as main mode of entertainment no doubt Video Advertising has been making an impeccable mark of delivering messages in more interesting forms via different modes from Apps to OTT and CTV etc. These mediums provide marketers with brand-safe advertising opportunities via AI/ML-driven mechanisms and offer them multiple options such as precise targeting, demographic and geolocation targeting, conditional and device level targeting to reach the right target audience. 

So this festival season with a blend of cricket, brands can make the most of it as earlier, the Cricket World Cup recorded strong TV broadcasting figures with the most viewed match of India versus Pakistan, which accumulated 256 million viewing hours in India (source: ICC Cricket). This time, the excitement is set to reach new heights, providing marketers with an exceptional opportunity to maximize their reach during the festive season. This would enable them to place adverts next to the most relatable and engaging content, matching the brand’s suitability in video advertising. Hence, with the increasing popularity of videos, marketers leverage them to maximize their brand presence as the power of videos better assists their storytelling than any other medium. 

Moreover, another significant factor that adds to the importance of the World Cup is that it gets broadcast in regional languages on different OTT platforms which holds more of the audiences’ interest. Last time, ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2022 broke digital engagement records and live streaming milestones as its broadcast viewing hours on digital platforms were up 59% wherein, multi-language coverage also extended to new territories (source: ICC Cricket). Marketers while relying on AI, especially during the festive season and the World Cup, can get a better understanding of users’ state of mind along with their expectations from the brands. AI via its Sentiment & Content Analysis enables them to build a personalized yet stronger connection with audiences and brands can monitor the users' emotions and sentiments and how they perceive a campaign.

Such matches develop a deeper connection with cricket which helps brands tap into the fans at granularity via AI mechanisms. AI data modelling and predictive algorithms help advertisers make realistic and informed business decisions as they get a better understanding of identifying the cohorts who show interest in brands’ offerings. 

Alongside this, AI captures logos, faces, elements, actions, and scenes via thorough analyses of historical sentiment data to understand user emotions and edges user interaction accordingly. Its Accuracy, Automation and Speed provide brands with predictive insights that help them gauge the public sentiments around the showcased content. As a result, marketers can better execute the campaign, considering what netizens are likely to view which bridges the gap between them and brands. 

Brands can also look forward to engaging with customers in innovative and personalized ways via AI’s Contextual Targeting. The blend of AI in Contextual Targeting plays a significant role in optimizing the campaign, especially during festivities as it delivers adverts to the users depending on the context and content they consume. Based on this, AI helps marketers with user profiling and enables them to showcase content that a user searches via keywords. This leads to dynamic content matching and placing ads for better ROAS and real-time decision-making that compliments the campaign performance.

By leveraging this, marketers can give their advertising efforts an extra edge with a blend of AI as it helps in monitoring the in-video content type such as sponsored or user-generated, depending on the users’ choices and preferences. This facilitates them to target videos accordingly and showcase similar brands for better outreach.

Now it is that time of the year when the Consumers, the Business Owners & the Marketers are equally excited as the user behaviour shifts from saving to spending and brand storytelling takes center stage. Owing to this, the in-app revenue increases during the pre-festive season and surges post-festivities because of AI’s mechanisms that give campaign performance an extra edge. So, with the ongoing sales season, I wish brands good luck in making their campaign a winning and successive one. They can also leverage the above-mentioned solution and implement it in their marketing toolkit to better stand out in festivities and sustain the digital ecosystem.