Turning Match Moments
into Brand Recall
— JK Cement × IPL 2025
Make cement memorable during cricket.
Cement is about as low-involvement as advertising gets. Consumers don’t browse cement brands on weekends. They don’t follow cement companies on Instagram. Purchase decisions happen infrequently, are largely delegated to contractors or architects, and are driven by availability and price — not by what ad they saw last week.
JK Cement came to us with a specific challenge: use the scale of IPL 2025 to build genuine brand recall among their core audience — Male 31–60, SEC ABC — without the usual spray-and-pray broadcast approach. The ask was precision, not just reach.
“How do you make cement memorable in 100 milliseconds of premium cricket?”
Three problems to solve simultaneously.
Building brand recall in a low-involvement category during a high-clutter sports event — where every FMCG and fintech brand is competing for the same attention — required us to solve three distinct problems at once.
Reaching a hard-to-find audience
Male 31–60, SEC ABC is dispersed, ad-averse, and increasingly consuming cricket on connected screens rather than linear TV. Broad broadcast buys were reaching the wrong people at the wrong efficiency.
Turning fleeting attention into lasting recall
During live sports, second screens dominate. Simply being present in the ad break wasn’t enough — placement timing relative to match intensity directly impacts how much viewers retain from an ad exposure.
Proving digital ROI for a traditional category
Cement brands rarely apply digital measurement frameworks. We needed to not just deliver results, but demonstrate them in a language the client could act on — online awareness, search lift, traffic growth.
Moment-based buying, not broadcast coverage.
The insight at the core of our strategy was simple but counterintuitive: fewer impressions at the right moment outperform more impressions spread evenly. Instead of running continuous GRP-led coverage across every match, we built a selective, data-triggered buying model around three interlocking layers.
JioHotstar’s Household and Connected TV inventory gave us access to the big-screen, lean-back viewing environment where attention is highest — unlike mobile, where IPL viewers are often scrolling simultaneously. This was the right canvas for a brand-recall play.
Three pillars, one integrated strategy.
Each pillar was designed to reinforce the others. Platform selection determined the quality of attention. Targeting ensured we were only paying for the right viewers. Moment-selection maximised the value of every impression we bought.
JioHotstar Household (HH) & Connected TV (CTV)
We restricted inventory to HH and CTV placements — not mobile, not desktop. This ensured the brand appeared on the primary screen in the living room, not a second-screen scroll experience. Premium inventory for a premium brand positioning play.
Selective, match-based buying driven by live performance data
We didn’t buy all matches equally. Using live audience composition data from the platform, we activated bids only when the actual viewership profile aligned with Male 31–60, SEC ABC — the exact decision-maker profile for cement purchases. This eliminated structural wastage on mismatched audiences.
Concentrated delivery around high-attention cricket moments
Research consistently shows brand recall spikes in the seconds immediately following a high-intensity cricket moment — a wicket, a boundary, a DRS review. We concentrated ad delivery in those windows. Less total volume, dramatically higher per-impression recall.
The numbers made the case.
Every metric validated the moment-based approach over broad coverage. The reach numbers were strong. But the brand-health numbers — measured independently by Kantar — were the real story.
measured by Kantar post-campaign
the creatives