FIFA ’26 on CTV is the biggest premium attention opportunity for marketers: Ankur Kapila

At the e4m Connected TV Conference 2026, Ankur Kapila, National Sales Head at Zee5, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited, delivered a spotlight session that was equal parts business pitch and cultural provocation. His argument, stripped to its core: FIFA 2026 on Zee5 is not merely a sports broadcast play. It is a convergence event for streaming, sports, and connected TV that India's brand ecosystem cannot afford to sit out.

Kapila opened by naming the question that has followed Zee5's FIFA acquisition into every boardroom and agency meeting: Will India watch FIFA? He acknowledged it directly, then reframed it. "The real question is, will the most valuable consumer watch FIFA in India? That's the real question," he told the audience. That distinction, he argued, changes the calculus for brands. In a marketing environment where attention and influence have displaced raw reach as the dominant currency, FIFA's over-indexed audience, which is urban, affluent, younger, and globally aware, is precisely the cohort every advertiser is chasing across every funnel. "Brands are no longer looking at only reach. They're looking at influence. They're looking at attention," he said.

The numbers he presented were significant. Zee5 is projecting 36 million unique devices tuning in for FIFA 2026 on its CTV proposition. But Kapila spent considerable time addressing what he called the timing myth: the concern that late-night and early-morning kickoffs will suppress viewership. His counter was historical. The Argentina versus Croatia semifinal at FIFA 2022 kicked off at 3:30 AM India time and drew 28 million viewers, making it the second most-watched match of the tournament after the final. "28 million people tuning in at 3:30 AM. It's just insane because people are passionate about it. They want to own the moment," Kapila said. In Japan and the United States, similarly inconvenient time slots for their respective audiences did not dent numbers for a sport that is not even the primary viewing sport in either country.

FIFA 2026 is also the largest edition of the tournament in history, with 104 matches across an expanded field, up from 64 in previous editions. Kapila mapped the broadcast slots to identify distinct viewer cohorts: core prime time around 9 to 11 AM, a midnight window familiar to fans of the English Premier League and European club football, 24 matches in the 3 AM to 5 AM band, and 27 matches between 6 AM and 9 AM His reading was that different time bands carry different audience compositions, and that brands need to engage with this complexity rather than reduce the entire event to a single risk-benefit calculation. "There is a different kind of cohort available across time bands when it comes to FIFA," he noted.

The emotional thread running through his session was passion as a behavioural override. He quoted fan sentiment from social media ahead of the tournament, with viewers declaring that sleep can wait, that they had waited four years for this moment, and that kickoff time is irrelevant. "Passion always, always defeats inconvenience," Kapila said, framing FIFA's quadrennial nature as the very thing that makes it resistant to the attention fragmentation plaguing most live content. "What we are trying to sell is one thing that every marketer, in modern marketing, considers the most important currency, and that is attention."

He closed the session by unveiling Zee5's campaign for the tournament, 'India Watchega', choosing the conference floor as its launch platform. "FIFA is no longer niche, streaming is no longer emerging, and CTV is definitely not experimental anymore," he said. "All three trends are converging at a moment that may become the biggest moment in Indian CTV history."

The session ended with Kapila reminding the room that the first match was airing that night at 12.30 AM on the Zee5 app, an invitation that was also, in its way, the final point of his presentation.