Can General Elections Steal IPL's Thunder?

India’s biggest jamborees, IPL and general elections, have clashed this year. Although the IPL season overlapped with the polls earlier in 2009 and 2014 as well, a direct clash was averted with the organisers deciding to shift the league overseas.

- Ruhail Amin

THE ON-GOING TWELFTH EDITION of the Indian Premier League (IPL) finds itself in a peculiar situation. This year, for the very first time, the tourney is poised for a head-on clash with another big event — the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Will the latter impact viewership? Although a similar situation had arisen for the multi-billion dollar league on two earlier occasions in its decade-long run, it was averted first in 2009 when it was hosted in South Africa, and again in 2014 when the organizers decided to take it to the UAE.

Game of viewership

With the first phase of elections already underway, for brands and for the league organizers, viewership will be the moot point. Keeping the viewership behavior in mind, many news channels have already spiked their ad rates, but does it mean that IPL viewers would switch loyalty?

According to Anita Nayyar, CEO, Havas Media Group, the Lok Sabha polls will be more relevant only during voting and counting days. “The way IPL viewership is peaking there seems very little possibility of it losing its thunder. However, general elections will have its own loyal viewership and will be more relevant to voting and counting days. Since the voting is happening in phases and is localized, the viewership of that phase/state will be more skewed to the same. In their own ways, they will do justice to the viewers in offering high powered sports/entertainment and high powered politics.”

Even if we look at the latest IPL viewership data, the overall viewership this year has been 31 percent higher than last year, as per the league’s official broadcast partner Star India citing BARC Preview data. It must be mentioned that the preview service allows subscribers to access the data of a specific event or show three days after it is telecast.