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How India’s biggest sports event will test whether advertisers adopt new TV currency

Pixelated streaming remote becoming increasingly clearer from the bottom to the top.
Illustration by Robyn Phelps / Shutterstock / The Current

It could be said that the Indian Premier League (IPL) is the Indian advertising landscape writ small (if daily audiences of hundreds of millions of cricket fans can qualify as such): brands of all sizes trying to find new customers and hold on to old ones, in a market as diverse as its media consumption habits.

One of the biggest changes in recent IPL seasons — and in Indian advertising in general — is not just how much inventory is being sold, but where audiences are watching: television, mobile streaming and, increasingly, connected TV. Advertisers now run campaigns across all these screens, but the systems used to measure those audiences have remained largely separate.

That’s about to change. In early March, Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India and Nielsen launched BARC | Nielsen ONE Ads, a cross-media tool that combines BARC’s TV panel with Nielsen’s digital and CTV data to deliver deduplicated reach, frequency and GRPs across linear TV, OTT, mobile and desktop. JioHotstar is the first platform to adopt it, with IPL 2026 as the major deployment.

It’s a seismic transition for India’s biggest sports event: The 2025 IPL season delivered over 840 billion minutes of viewing and more than 1 billion unique viewers across television and digital platforms, making it the most-watched IPL to date.

But the question isn’t whether the technology works — it’s whether advertisers and media owners will trust and use unified reach numbers as a planning and pricing currency. IPL 2026, which began its 65-day run last weekend, will be the first large-scale test.

Some show cautious optimism, while others are waiting and seeing

Recent data from BARC and Nielsen suggested reasons for optimism. Their pilot run with the ICC T20 World Cup — which preceded IPL 2026 by some weeks — found that cross-platform audience duplication between TV and digital (including CTV, mobile and desktop) stayed below 10% across all campaigns, indicating largely distinct audiences and incremental reach for integrated planning. Essentially, the pilot showed that brands are finding new eyeballs.

Rajiv Dubey, head of media and digital marketing at FMCG giant Dabur, said cross-screen measurement that truly deduplicates reach is more than a reporting upgrade, and could directly influence media planning.

“Historically, large properties like the IPL have been planned with assumed overlap between TV and digital. With the BARC-Nielsen integration, a unified view of the consumer may allow us to plan more deliberately for incrementality,” he told The Current.

“The real impact will depend on how granular and timely the data is. If it becomes near real time and cohort-led, it can meaningfully change in-plan optimization during the tournament, which is where the real upside lies,” he added.

Several other advertisers and agencies declined to comment for this story, at least before the beginning of the tournament, suggesting a cautious approach to what could be a significant shift in how media is planned and evaluated (the “unsure” emojis I received helped underscore this).

JioHotstar and Nielsen also declined to comment on the rollout and adoption of unified cross-screen measurement for IPL 2026.

“This first came into existence for the World Cup … implementation, accuracy and acceptance are all yet to be seen,” said Rahul Vengalil, co-founder and CEO at Tgthr. “Till there is 100% adoption, unified measurement will remain the holy grail that all marketers are chasing.”

The stakes are high when it comes to IPL

The hesitation isn’t for lack of stakes. Houlihan Lokey’s 2025 IPL Brand Valuation Study pegs the total IPL ecosystem at about $18.5 billion, with the stand-alone brand worth $3.9 billion. When that much money is on the table, few marketers will likely want to be the first to bet their IPL plans on a new measurement currency — or at least admit to doing so.

IPL 2025 was also a high-water mark for the industry in terms of sheer scale. Media Partners Asia estimates that IPL 2025 generated roughly ₹5,000 crore ($600 million) in advertising revenue across TV and digital, up about 50% from the previous season.

For ad tech and programmatic players, unified measurement may also begin to change how campaigns are optimized during the tournament itself rather than only after it ends.

Siddharth Dabhade, global chief business officer at Lemma, said unified cross-screen measurement is beginning to move from reporting into real-time optimization.

“In the past, cross-screen data would arrive weeks after a campaign ended, which meant it was only useful for post-campaign analysis,” he said. “Now, with unified IDs and AI-driven platforms, buyers can cap frequency across CTV, mobile and desktop in real time and even shift budgets mid-flight based on outcomes. Unified measurement is effectively moving CTV from a pure awareness medium into the performance stack.”

The technology for the new unified cross-screen system is live, and the ICC World Cup pilot data suggests it could work. What IPL 2026 may reveal is whether it delivers on the list of measurement upgrades the industry has long clamored for — or, as they say on the pitch, gets bowled out before it reaches the crease.