STAR SPORTS REFRESH

TitleSTAR SPORTS REFRESH
BrandSTAR INDIA
Product / ServiceBROADCASTER
CategoryA02. Use of Magazines/Newspapers
EntrantMINDSHARE Mumbai, INDIA
Media Agency MINDSHARE Mumbai, INDIA
Entrant Company MINDSHARE Mumbai, INDIA
Media Agency 2 MINDSHARE Mumbai, INDIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Anita Kotwani Mindshare Principal Partner
Preeti Macarenhas Mindshare Principal Partner
Rahul Satoskar Mindshare Partner
Arun Narang Mindshare Sr.director
Vijay Malhotra Mindshare Planning Manager
Arun Subramanian Mindshare Account Executive
Shilpy Agarwal Mindshare Partner
Girish Kenkare Mindshare Investment Group Head
Mohammed Faisal Saiyed Mindshare Manager Strategy

Results and Effectiveness

In the first week of the campaign, total communication awareness reached 87% and for the key attribute “does the network inspire the sports fan in you?” grew sharply to 85% (dramatically up by 20%). Tracking research confirmed that the print ads got a stronger emotional response (client continuous tracker data). The integrated campaign earned huge media coverage, equivalent to $1 million. Viewership in TV saw an increase in the relevant categories Category From To By All Sports 201 4774 2275% Football viewership 4624 6628 43% Car racing viewership 361 725 101% Domestic cricket viewership 438 1272 190%

Creative Execution

Print was the ideal channel to reverse the hierarchy of general news v/s sports coverage as most people read the newspaper sequentially. As an innovation, we featured Sports Page News on the front page of two of the largest Indian newspapers. Thus for the first time in the history of Indian newspapers the sports page took dominance over general and entertainment news. The Sports Page and the Sports masthead replaced the “National and Important” news. Accompanying the sports front page was a full page ad with the messaging –“A Sports revolution starts today, bringing sports to the forefront” At the dawn of the campaign in print, millions of readers woke up to sports coverage, as against national, international political and other news. For the sports lover, it was a reiteration of a new level of precedence of sports in national coverage.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Traditionally, India as a country has high viewership only for Cricket in the Sports Genre. The leading broadcaster in India, Star Network was launching 6 new channels under the umbrella of Star Sports in a new channel structure. The idea was to positively impact the future of sports coverage by moving it from a cricket-dominated structure to one that equally emphasised and showcased every sport. Our insight revealed that for every newspaper, sports news and coverage was an afterthought with news, and even entertainment taking the pride of the place. In print we chose to reverse this order and bring sports to the forefront to tell India that with our bouquet of 6 channels we were committed to give primacy to sports coverage.