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Star's big gamble with Kabaddi pays off

High-decibel marketing has changed the face of India's humble sport, Kabaddi. Hold your breath: Viewership on opening night surpassed that of the FIFA World Cup 2014 opening game by ten times!

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Star's big gamble with Kabaddi pays off

Star's big gamble with Kabaddi pays off

High-decibel marketing has changed the face of India's humble sport, Kabaddi. Hold your breath: Viewership on opening night surpassed that of the FIFA World Cup 2014 opening game by ten times!

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Mumbai | August 1, 2014

STAR-Sports-Pro-Kabaddi-League

Never before has any new league managed to create a buzz as huge as that created by the Star Sports Pro Kabaddi League. The eight-city franchise based league that portrays action packed 'live' Kabaddi content in an uber-cool format received an incredible start with over 22 million television viewers tuned in on the opening night. This data, when extrapolated to All India Universe, as per standard industry conversions, indicates that over 66 million Indians have watched the opening night games.

This is ten times higher than that witnessed in India during the opening match between Brazil and Croatia of the recently concluded FIFA World Cup which reached 2.1million viewers (extrapolated 6.6 million viewers). (Source: TAM CS4+ data).

This first-of-its-kind Star Sports Pro-Kabaddi League has become one of the most talked about events on social media. Pro-Kabaddi generated tremendous online conversations and was trending through the event and into the next day as well. In fact, within 12 hours into the league, Star Sports Pro-Kabaddi and related conversations had received approximately 140 million impressions on Twitter and equally significant numbers in the form of Facebook activity.

The conversation was sparked off by the influencers and celebrities present in-stadia with the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwariya Rai, Farah Khan, Boman Irani, Sunil Shetty, industrialist Anand Mahindra and others tweeting their experiences, and the activation of the Twitter mirror 'Signature selfies' at the game. The excitement and online conversation soon spread to excited fans across the country revelling in the revival of the traditional sport. The sentiment was overwhelmingly positive with over 90 per cent highly positive comments and reactions. Even the Amul girl could not resist the charms of Kabaddi with the iconic, mirror of our times campaign headlined 'Kha-buddy…'

Uday Shankar Uday Shankar

Uday Shankar, CEO, Star India, commented, “We are very excited about Kabaddi but these are early days. At Star we believe in building content on a long-term basis and our positions and moods don't swing based on day one ratings. We strongly believe in the potential of Kabaddi and that is the reason we are working so hard to build it.”

(The figures are aggregated numbers for Star Sports channels and Star Gold.)

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

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