Its been more than two months since the #ViVOIPL 2018 got over – one of the top most properties in India across categories –  and it’s a good time to take stock of how the top brands fought it out on the playground to showcase their exciting brand activations to delight their consumers and deepen key brand perceptions.

Netimpact Solutions (a specialist in big data social analytics) did a social analysis around the brands that were active during the IPL. There were a large number of brands spending a lot of time and resources to leverage IPL  to engage with their users.  Rahul Saighal, MD Netimpact (an advanced data analytics and ORM partner) ‘We track IPL and the social conversations around it as its such an impactful property where a lot of brand activity is visible. This year two interesting points stood out. Firstly the Handset and Telco brands dominated the top social salience spots. Secondly, such is the pull of IPL on the public imagination that even iconic non official sponsor brands like Vodafone and Amazon India crafted high impact mixes that cleverly played around the cricket theme against the backdrop of the ongoing IPL’. Here is a summary of some of the interesting highlights based on social conversations.

Vodafone

Vodafone was not a sponsor this year – but who can forget their iconic campaigns from earlier years of IPL. However, this did not deter the brand from investing smartly around the league to generate huge social media conversations.

They ran a campaign called “Unofficial Sponsors of Fans ™” using the imagery of their beloved Zoozoos. The campaign along with other elements around it was so successful that they emerged as the number one brand around the cricket-led chatter in the IPL 2018 period. Vodafone garnered more than 0.75 Mn social media conversations for the 2 months, mostly driven by their FANtastic Breaks Contest.

Siddharth Banerjee- EVP Marketing, Vodafone India says, “Each year, Vodafone delights millions of our customers with unique offerings and experiences from the Vodafone Super Fan to ZooZoo fan activities. This season, we wanted to engage with the cricket fanatics who eat, sleep and live cricket and are fanatical about their cricket trivia. Given the boom in data consumption, we also wanted to tap into the multi-screening behavior of consumers where people continuously move between TV screens and their phones. This inspired us to launch The Unofficial Sponsor of FANs campaign, targeted to die-hard cricket lovers. We engaged with these fans with a massive cricket quiz contest called the FANtastic Breaks Contestand via moment marketing, we ensured that whenever millions of fans interacted with their phones, the contests would be activated on their social media feeds, allowing them to win attractive prizes from iPhones to a Trip to Lords. In short, we turned this cricket season into a national cricket lovers party – at massive scale leveraging digital technology.”

Vivo

Vivo as the Title sponsor ,led when it came to social mentions involving IPL, driven by the mentions of the hashtag, #VivoIPL. Vivo ran an interesting campaign called the #VivoPerfectFan. They created the digital property for fans to post their IPL related cheers to get a chance to win free match tickets. This created considerable buzz on social. Vivo also posted daily fan scorecards related to the campaign on theirSocial Pages.

Jio

Jio as a key sponsor of 7 IPL teams was also a top conversation generator and its social buzz was driven by the #JioPlayAlong contest posts. Consumers resonated with this contest, which was played out only during an IPL match. The contest questions were based on the happening of the IPL match.

Amazon

Conversations for Amazon were led by the imaginary cricket team, Chonkpur Cheetahs and the offers/ quiz posts on them. This is a continuing property from last year and saw continued traction and investment from Amazon India. After Vodafone, this was the 2nd big property where a non sponsor put big and successful efforts around the IPL.

Oppo

Conversations for Oppo were led by the buzz around their IPL related posts using #RealChampion. This property was mainly on live contests for ongoing IPL matches. Oppo also used the hashtag to magnify the features of the Oppo F7 smartphone.

Nokia

Nokia was the third of the mobile players driving high conversations. Social chatter for Nokia were led by the Shares/ RTs of their posts on the KKR team using #PlayUnited. Consumers liked the fact that Nokia posted key match and player updates for KKR. The team also endorsed the newly launched phones like the Nokia7Plus, which garnered considerable engagement by the audience.

In sum, ViVO IPL 2018 was a massive stage for brands to connect with their consumers and witnessed some iconic brand engagements. It saw brands using creativity pushed a to a very high level, with Vodafone’s “Unofficial Sponsors of fans” property standing out. Technology led companies dominated the top slots around social conversations.

NetImpact Solutions specializes in Big Data social analytics and online reputation management. The above analysis is based on tracked social conversations (sum of shares, tweets, RT’s, replies, blogs – it excludes likes and views) around various brands during the period of April to May 2018. For more information: contact@netimpactlimited.com