In India, women athletes like Mary Kom, Sania Nehwal, and Sania Mirza accounted for 40 per cent of the total endorsement value among non-cricketers. While releasing the report, Vinit Karnik, business head, ESP properties highlighted how there is growth.
“We do pre-empt brands showing interest in athletes like PV Sindhu, Sakshi Malik, Dipa Karmakar, Manavjit Singh Sandhu and Shiva Thapa among others, however, what will make us a truly sporting nation is when infrastructure and funds happen from grassroots levels,” says Karnik.
“In India, we talk about athletes only around a big event like Olympics, commonwealth games etc… It’s high time we as a country rise and start supporting athletes really early on and help them with world class training facilities and support staff,” he added.
There are many corporate institutions believe that winning medals will change the way the event is perceived in the future and also attract sponsorships. According to Gossain as the cost of the brand, the association is low (at the country contingent level and in terms of associating with sports people) brands are finding the return on investment attractive.
This year saw huge participation from corporate such as Adani, JSW, Herbalife, Amul, Edelweiss, Li Ning, Tata Salt is sponsoring the Rio Contingent. Adani and JSW took up Olympic funding through a CSR route where they funded the training of a number of athletes. According to Financial Express, this year too has marked a great difference in the way Olympics are perceived. Massive eyeballs and conversations have initiated across physical and social media.
According to Financial Express, this year too has marked a great difference in the way Olympics are perceived. Massive eyeballs and conversations have initiated across physical and social media.
“Twitter trends, Facebook walls — everything is talking about Olympics. Although we are way behind countries like China where Olympics is like a mainstream slotted TV content, but we are making significant progress,” says Hitesh Gossain, founder & CEO of Onspon.com.
This year in June, Star Sports announced that they will broadcast Olympic in their all eight channels. They even avoided broadcasting the first three matches of the England vs Pakistan Test series that ended with a thrilling draw. Star Sports’ four HD channel has been giving round the clock coverage of the game straight from Rio de Janerio. It happens for the first time in India.
The games started on August 5. According to BARC India, the opening ceremony across all the nine channels (Doordarshan), Star Sports 1,2,3,4 (SD+HD)channels) garnered 0.5 million impressions.
The telecast across channels for cumulatively 950 hours, Olympic in the first 7 days ( August 6-12) gained 210.9 million impressions. The event is also being aired on Hotstar-the network’s OTT platform.