Beyond the Jersey:
Owning Hyderabad
— Star Health × SRH
Turn a jersey logo into a city-wide brand presence.
Star Health Insurance secured the Official Health Insurance Partner position for Sunrisers Hyderabad for IPL 2025 — getting the brand on the jersey and earning digital rights across all 19 matches. That was the starting point, not the strategy.
The brief to us was more ambitious: don’t just be present on the SRH jersey — own Hyderabad during the IPL season. Build a 360° amplification that makes Star Health impossible to miss, whether you’re at the airport, on the Metro, watching at home on CTV, or following the match online.
“Being on the jersey is one thing. Being everywhere the SRH fan looks — that’s a different brief entirely.”
Making a team partnership work harder than a logo placement.
Health insurance is a considered purchase — not impulse-driven. Brand association and trust are the primary purchase drivers. A jersey logo alone generates passive impressions, but doesn’t build the kind of repeated, contextually relevant exposure needed to shift brand perception or association scores.
Activation beyond the stadium
The majority of SRH fans in Hyderabad never attend a live match — they watch on screens and move through the city. The brand needed to exist where those fans actually were, not just on a pitch-side board seen by the 30,000 in the ground.
National scale from a city-specific partnership
SRH has a concentrated fanbase in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, but Star Health operates nationally. Amplifying the partnership to a national health insurance audience required a CTV layer that could scale the message beyond Hyderabad’s geography.
Measuring brand impact, not just media delivery
Proving that a team partnership actually moves brand association — not just delivers impressions — required third-party measurement. The goal was a top brand association ranking in category, measurable by Kantar, not just a media delivery certificate.
A three-layer strategy: on-ground, city-wide, national.
We designed the campaign around three interlocking environments — each one reinforcing the other. The jersey and digital rights anchored the brand to the team. OOH made that association unavoidable across Hyderabad. CTV carried the message to the national health insurance audience who’d never see an SRH hoarding.
The three layers were deliberately sequenced for reinforcement. A Hyderabad commuter would see the OOH on the Metro, see the jersey branding while watching the match at home on CTV, and encounter the brand again on JioHotstar pre-rolls. Frequency through environment diversity — not repetitive placement in one channel.
Three channels, one integrated brand experience.
Each channel was activated with context-specific creative and placement logic, not a single asset repurposed across formats. The creative approach recognised that the Metro commuter, the CTV viewer, and the matchday digital audience were encountering the brand in fundamentally different mindsets.
Team Partnership
Official SRH insurance partner: jersey branding and full digital rights activated across all 19 IPL 2025 matches — creating a consistent brand-team association throughout the tournament.
OOH Amplification
Airport hoardings, stadium-route outdoor, Metro station formats, and Metro train wraps across Hyderabad — turning the city’s highest-footfall arteries into a Star Health × SRH corridor during the IPL season.
CTV Streaming
JioHotstar Household targeting scaled the brand communication nationally — reaching health insurance decision-makers watching IPL on the primary TV screen at home, beyond Hyderabad’s geographic boundary.
The Metro activation deserves specific mention: with 22.2M footfall recorded across the campaign window, the Metro placement alone delivered more qualified Hyderabad audience exposure than many traditional outdoor campaigns achieve in an entire year.
No.1 brand association in category.
The 360° strategy delivered across every measurement dimension — from raw media delivery to the brand health metric that mattered most: 51% brand association, making Star Health the No.1 associated brand in the health insurance category during the IPL season.