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In the land of sports fanatics that is India, IPL has been a game-changer. Since its inception in 2008, the IPL has evolved into a cultural phenomenon, captivating audiences and reshaping the way India celebrates sports. Being an annual extravaganza, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has a wider impact than one can imagine. It also influences business landscapes and consumer behaviour in India.
With the IPL season in full swing, we recently hosted a webinar with industry experts from Disney+Hotstar, MPL, Swiggy and Cashfree Payments to discuss the impact of IPL and sporting events on business dynamics and consumer behaviour, insights on winning strategies and how to handle major payment surges during such events.
Here’s everyone who joined us to make it an interesting session.
- Ashwin Goyal, Group PM, Disney+ Hotstar
- Ravi Shekhar, Associate Vice President, MPL
- Shubham Choudhary, Product Leader, Quizizz, ex- Swiggy
- Amlan Chanda, Director of Product Management, Cashfree Payments
- Aditi Olemann, Senior Director, Product Marketing & Strategy, Cashfree Payments moderated the session.
Watch the video for the full conversation.
[Webinar] Winning Strategies: Capitalising surge in demand during major sports events
Read on below for key takeaways from the webinar.
Demand surges and shifts in consumer trends during IPL
With IPL, comes demand surges and a dramatic shift in consumer trends. With each match, we witness a dynamic shift in how people engage, indulge, and spend on online platforms, driving a surge as fans unite in their passion for the sport. Brands put in months of preparations involving platform readiness, operations, logistics and educating partners about the incoming surge.
Snacking and Entertainment: A winning combo!
At the onset, Shubham emphasised the significant role such events play in driving growth for companies like Swiggy. He highlighted the spike in demand experienced during the IPL, attributing it to the entertainment factor associated with the tournament, which naturally complements food consumption.
Given that snacking goes with entertainment, Shubham added that IPL brings in a surge in purchases across food and grocery segments during matches – “For a lot of Indian companies, primarily IPL might be an awareness-driver…. but for a category like Swiggy…. you can actually trigger a purchase during the event itself.”
Online Gaming surges overall
Ravi shed light on the trends observed in online gaming, noting a surge in searches related to cricket fantasy games during the IPL period. Not just cricket, almost 50% of the traffic also spikes for other games – “The energy is infectious. Indian audience is not just hungry for cricket games but also have appetite and excitement for other casual games and card games.”
Device matters
Ashwin delved into the nuances of sports persona for OTT platforms, highlighting the differences between mobile users and TV viewers. He pointed out that while TV viewers are better for platforms in terms of monetization and attention span, the scale of mobile users is crucial for acquiring a broader audience – “from a scale perspective which I think Cricket is all about – I think mobile is where the game is at.”
Product Challenges and Solutions
Spike in payments during large-scale events
From the perspective of a payments infrastructure empowering platforms such as hyperlocal delivery platforms and OTT, Amlan discussed the spikes observed in payment transactions during the IPL and similar events, emphasising the need for preparation and support for merchants to drive high success and conversion rates – “We see an unprecedented scale in terms of incoming payments, outgoing payments, but in general for e-commerce and logistics – the volume actually increases.”
To ensure low payment failure rate even in the face of high volumes of transactions, multiple payment gateways come to the rescue. flowWise by Cashfree Payments helps merchants integrate any new payment aggregators within 2 weeks. With flowWise, merchants gain access to a comprehensive payment management tool featuring AI-driven smart routing or rule-based routing based on 40+ parameters. It ensures a unified checkout experience irrespective of the payment gateway used and provides a convenient dashboard for tracking transactions and settlements across different payment gateways.
He highlighted the extensive support provided by Cashfree Payments to merchants, including round-the-clock assistance during the IPL season, underscoring the commitment to facilitating seamless transactions and customer experiences. He went on to share an interesting insight – “When the toss happens, that’s when the PG actually spikes. Once the match winner is declared, that’s where the payouts spike.” He added more on the Payouts : “We do a bunch of cool things, like on Payouts you can actually monitor the performance of beneficiary banks.”
The merchants can make payouts 24×7 in all payment modes with Cashfree Payments, even on bank holidays. Also, merchants get access to an intuitive dashboard to track the success rate, turn-around time and latency for payouts in real-time. Thanks to the powerful connected banking, they can set low-balance thresholds to accounts, get alerts and get the payout load smartly split between multiple fund sources. The tool has the ‘low balance transfer queuing’ feature to automatically route the transactions, if they had gotten stopped due to low balance in fund sources.
Product Integrations
Turning to product integrations and solutions to seize this surge, Shubham shared Swiggy’s innovative strategies over the years – “Every IPL, there is a new idea.” One notable experiment years ago was “Swiggy Sixes,” offering a 60% discount for six minutes after each IPL six—a successful acquisition lever. It was ultimately discontinued due to serviceability issues. Another initiative involved a product integration with Hotstar, allowing users to order directly from the app, driving significant engagement and awareness. Ashwin also mentioned gamifications like ‘Predict and Win’ and ‘Collect Runs’ which show up on the platform every season.
Attention Span
From an OTT standpoint, Ashwin shared how platforms tackle incremental user growth during IPL and methods to sustain this growth. “On game days, what an OTT player is effectively buying is the user’s attention”, implying that it is not just rival apps but also social media apps like Instagram that are its competition. The real challenge is to figure out how to monetise the limited attention the user has spent or will spend on the OTT platform.
User Experience
Ravi further added to the conversation on the challenges a gaming platform such as MPL tackles during IPL, in terms of scale of operations and security. When it comes to money, challenges with upstream systems such as bank downtime and maintenance activity can be a nightmare. Another is when UPI goes down causing multiple issues, as it is the most popular payment method among the gaming demographic. Delayed TAT for payment processing also disturbs the AHA moment for any user. As a quick solution, users are educated via in-app messages. Another way to resolve it is to have an in-app wallet. On the security front, a lot of AI-ML is leveraged for close monitoring and transaction monitoring for an enhanced user experience.
In terms of balancing out Success Rates and tackling downtimes, Amlan from Cashfree Payments shares “What we have realised is that our merchants need a lot of flexibility at the same time as they need redundancy. For that we have something called flowWise, which is our orchestration layer on the PG side. On the PO side, we take care of the whole lifecycle from initiation to reconciliation. We monitor both TAT and SR.”
Bytes from QnA
Acquisition Vs Churn
Answering a question by a participant, about retaining newly acquired users during IPL, Ashwin emphasized the importance of delivering a stellar consumer experience, ensuring high-quality service, and maintaining fundamental aspects of operations. He suggested employing growth tactics like offering cashback to incentivize user retention.
Ravi from MPL, echoed the sentiment, underscoring the significance of trust in real-money gaming. He advocated for creating a delightful user journey—from the initial login to the first gameplay and seamless withdrawal of winnings—to foster trust and loyalty. Ravi also highlighted the use of free lobbies to provide users with a risk-free experience, thereby reducing customer acquisition costs and expanding the range of games available to attract and retain users.
Emerging Tech and OTT
Ashwin from Disney+ Hotstar, expressed his view on the significance of emerging technologies in the OTT landscape, noting that their impact has yet to manifest significantly. He observed that the usage rate of emerging tech remains relatively low, although it does serve as a positive aspect for publicity. Ashwin remarked that, thus far, he hasn’t observed any notable changes in consumption patterns resulting from the integration of technologies like AI, which are primarily used for a content recommendation based on user signals. He projected that it might take a couple more years for these technologies to make a substantial impact on the OTT industry.
Products to fuel loyalty programs and instant refunds
Amlan took up this question from a payments perspective – “It depends on what kind of campaign the merchants wants to run. Whatever they think of, we can support from a payments perspective”. Focussing on disbursals like cashbacks, he shared that we at Cashfree Payments facilitate disbursals via IMPS, UPI, Cards, Tokenised Cards etc. Most of these disburals are in real-time, allow redundancy and provide up-to-date information. Apart from this, there is the new PayToPhoneNumber solution from Cashfree Payments for quick payouts.
