Mumbai: The festive season brings a double whammy for advertisers and brands as the Asia Cup and the much-awaited World Cup (Hosts – India) is set to take the country by storm. With a potential reach of 600+ million, the World Cup on television is the place to be for advertisers looking to capture the attention of viewers during the festive season. The interview series "Pitch Perfect" discusses with leading marketers their thoughts about the World Cup and how advertisers can best leverage the mega event on television.

Indiantelevision.com’s Anil NM Wanvari in a fireside chat with Mondelez India Anjali Madan association with Cricket on Live TV.

Your thoughts on India winning the recently concluded Asia Cup which you were a part of on TV

Well, I was definitely elated and it's a great thing for the team and Indian viewers with the World Cup coming up. We were at the Asia Cup as a sponsor brand. It’s a great investment for us from an opportunity standpoint.

On your thoughts about the World Cup 2023 and any plans to leveraging this opportunity

The timing is absolutely perfect for us. It's also the time of the year when all our brands are, targeting different sets of consumers for the festive season. We have a large gifting portfolio of brands and chocolates have now become ubiquitous to the gifting category. So we will be going live with some interesting campaigns at that point in time and the timing couldn’t get better.

On how Mondelez is planning to leverage Cricket World Cup on television

There is going to be a lot of excitement around it. We are expecting that a lot of people will tune in to watch the megaevent. We have a remarkably interesting campaign that we are launching at that point in time. I cannot reveal too much about it. But it's a campaign that you will see centered around one of our brands that has a very large share in our portfolio.

We also have a campaign for Cadbury Dairy Milk. Cadbury Dairy Milk every year comes live on to the IPL. We have a theme of generosity around the brand. So you will see the generosity campaign coming to life again during the World Cup and there's a lot of engagement planned with the brand. It's a very new and refreshing take on generosity for the campaign this year. That's what we have planned in the pipeline. Definitely I think it's going to be one of those events where everybody is going to be glued to their TV sets for sure or their mobiles to catch the action.

On how Mondelez has benefited from its continued partnerships with Star Sports on major cricketing events

Like every year, we have a very interesting campaign that we do with the IPL with the network that we are working with this year for the World Cup. I think one of the big things that we see every year for us when we do IPL is that the ROI uplift for us is significant. We see almost a 3-4X uplift that happens in the brand metrics as well as our ROI numbers when we are on cricket. And that's a huge impact property for us that we're building.

The association also means that they help us get the right talent on board. They also help us with planning out how our activity should happen. We have special content snippets that we have, we have placement that happens at the opportune moment during the sporting season. I would say that they are indispensable partners of ours for all these years. Undeniably, they are the ones that helped us bring the eyeballs in so a very strong partnership over there.

On the role of cricket on television has played for Mondelez in driving impact

I think one thing for sure is that television helps you get that quick, rich build-up that you need, especially with a high-impact property, like sports and cricket. You get that build-up almost immediately for your campaign, what also helps us is that there is a lot of peripheral activity that happens as well, apart from the main sporting event itself, right. Apart from just the matches, there's a lot of other conversations that happen. Those conversations that happen around the matches, what is happening in the back rooms, and what is happening with the players and the commentary and all that helps us build a lot of the storytelling that we want to do for our brand. We leverage that I would say phenomenally well with Star Sports and our association over the last few years.

Even today, watching a sport on a big screen is an experience in itself. A lot of people who watch sports on their mobile phones probably are catching up on what they have missed between the big events in the activity. Watching the World Cup or watching the IPL or watching any sport on a large television screen has its own charm and the role of television is undeniable in that case. What we did with Star Sports is every year in partnership with them, we work very closely with their content and editorial team to build the central thought or idea that we have around the brand.