Win with InMobi: upGrad finds a winning partnership in data science and cricket

The Indian Premier League (IPL), since its launch in 2008, has become a strong platform for brands and advertisers, given the immense popularity of the T20 cricket tournament. To tap into the love Indians have for the sport, upGrad brought data science and cricket together on the mobile’s lock screen to improve brand awareness. Amidst the IPL buzz, upGrad promoted their specialised data science courses on Glance.

Positioning itself as a leader in specialisation courses, the brand tied up the relevance of data science to modern-day cricket with some office humour through a series of videos featuring Vikram Sathaye, a popular cricket presenter, analyst and stand-up comedian, who took on the role of ‘Data Scientwist’ to endorse the campaign.

upGrad captured significant interest with Glance audiences, including those consuming cricket content as well as those looking for entertainment. With Glance, the EdTech company moved away from traditional advertising formats by fostering community engagement on millions of lock screens.

Glance shot, conceptualised and delivered 64 original videos. The content centered around data science, which were integrated with cricket stats and office jokes on every lock screen. A range of exclusive 20-30 second scripts was built on data points pertaining to respective matches, adhering to the festive cheer of the IPL season. The content was featured to the audience from 12 pm to 10 pm, which is just before or during the IPL matches, thus increasing the relevance of the content.

The campaign created a huge buzz amongst Glance users during its run time, reaching over 16 million+ unique users and garnering over 30 million+ views. 75% of the exposure was from Tier I cities like Delhi, Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai, where audiences showed more than 51% engagement in these regions. 85% of the clicks were unique clicks, implying it was clean, non-bot traffic.

Vikram Sathaye’s social influence alone touched 91K+ users, gathering 88K+ views in total.