Are IPL 2026 ads on sticky wicket?

The numbers, by any measure, are staggering. Total advertising spends for IPL 2026 have crossed ₹7,000 crore across broadcast and digital, and that figure doesn't fully account for the parallel torrent of rupees flowing into influencer activations, social media war rooms, programmatic buys, and on-ground sponsorships. 

Digital ad spend alone is projected to touch ₹4,400 crore this season, up from ₹3,800 crore in 2025, according to a report by creator intelligence platform Qoruz. Over two dozen sponsors have boarded JioStar's roster, with category representation stretching from fintech and FMCG to mobility and consumer goods.

And yet, ask anyone to recall a single IPL 2026 ad that moved them, made them laugh, or lodged itself somewhere in the back of their mind. Chances are, they'll struggle. Not because they weren't watching. They were. But because, for all its scale and spectacle, IPL 2026 could be shaping up to be one of the most forgettable advertising seasons in the tournament's nearly two-decade history.

The data, uncomfortable as it is, bears this out. A recent analysis by Chrome OTT (COTT) found that creative effectiveness (not media weight) is the primary driver of consumer recall in IPL 2026. 

The report revealed a growing disconnect between exposure and memorability. Lloyd AC dominated visibility with a 15.2% impression share, but delivered only 5.2% recall. Renault Duster clocked 12.1% exposure with a muted 4-point recall figure. Even globally recognised names like Red Bull and Apple MacBook Neo faced recall challenges, reinforcing that brand equity alone can no longer guarantee cut-through in a fragmented attention economy. The outlier, and the lesson hiding in plain sight, was Tata Sierra, which recorded the highest recall at 8.3% despite a relatively modest 6.8% impression share. Strong storytelling had outperformed heavier media spends. It almost always does.

A media buy, not a storytelling opportunity

The diagnosis, from where senior practitioners sit, is fairly consistent: brands are treating IPL as a media transaction rather than a creative canvas. Vishakha Khattri, AVP at McCann India, describes the pattern with the kind of bluntness that comes from watching it play out repeatedly. "Brands often come in just a month or even a week before the Indian Premier League and say, 'We want to be on IPL', without asking what they want to say — or whether they want to create something meaningful or just be visible," she says. "For many, IPL is simply about mass reach; cricket unites the country, even non-fans end up watching it with friends, family, or partners, making it a cultural moment, but brands are treating it like a media buy, not a storytelling opportunity."

The comparison to the Super Bowl (the gold standard of advertising as a cultural event) comes up with striking regularity among Indian creatives. In the United States, a Super Bowl ad slot is a creative brief in itself. Agencies brief up months in advance. Production is treated as a cinematic exercise. 

The ads are reviewed, debated, and discussed independently of the game. In India, IPL offers the same concentration of eyeballs, arguably a far larger one (with viewership expected to cross 620 million this season), but the creative intent is simply not there. "Unlike something like the Super Bowl, where ads are crafted to be talked about, here the intent is just to occupy a small window, and that's not enough to create recall," says Khattri.

Ashish Pathak, Executive Creative Director at Edelman and formerly Creative Director at Ogilvy & Mather and VP & Senior Creative Director at Wunderman Thompson South Asia, frames this as a failure of conviction. "IPL is essentially India's version of the Super Bowl, a stage where the most iconic advertising could be created, but brands aren't leveraging it that way," he says. "What's missing right now is that conviction. Brands are playing it safe, avoiding bold bets, and without that belief in big ideas, they're not backing campaigns with the kind of budgets or ambition needed to create something that sticks."

The shrinking creative window

There is also a structural problem, and it operates at the level of the brief itself. The format war (the gradual compression of the ad unit from 30 seconds to 20, sometimes to 10) has fundamentally changed what agencies are asked to produce. But the issue isn't the duration. It's what brands are doing with it.

Ashish Khazanchi, Managing Partner at Enormous Brands, puts the problem squarely on execution philosophy rather than format constraints. "The currency of IPL advertising today is 10, 15, or at most 20 seconds. While some brands are still building creatives specifically for these shorter formats, a lot of advertisers are relying on cutdowns rather than designing ideas from the ground up for a 20-second narrative," he says. "If 20 seconds is the new normal, then storytelling has to be built for that constraint from the start, not adapted later."

Khattri echoes this, but adds another layer, saying that brands aren't just shrinking the format, they're filling whatever space remains with the product. "Brands want 15 seconds of pure product visibility and leave barely any room for storytelling, essentially handcuffing creatives," she explains. "Even if they want to tell a compelling story, there's no space to do it." The result is a category of advertising that is high on information and low on meaning: ads that register as noise rather than signal.

Pathak, for his part, refuses to let the format take the blame entirely. "Duration isn't the real limitation. If a client truly believes in an idea, they will invest in longer storytelling formats because they understand the power of a strong narrative," he argues. The evidence from IPL's own creative history would support that. The ZooZoo campaigns that Vodafone Idea ran in the tournament's earlier seasons were not long-form epics; they were short, character-driven spots built for the exact kind of fragmented, distracted viewing that IPL demands. But they were designed, not adapted. And they are still remembered, years after the brand stopped making them.

The fragmentation problem

There's a broader macro-level shift at work here, too, and Anadi Sah, National Creative Director, Chief Innovation Officer, and Founding Partner of tgthr, is well-placed to articulate it. "When you compare this season to earlier years, say 2010 to 2015, the ecosystem itself was very different. Back then, IPL was one of the few dominant ways to reach mass audiences, so brands concentrated their storytelling there. Today, media is far more fragmented — you have mobile-first consumption, connected TV, second-screen behaviour, in-stream purchases, and highly targeted digital ecosystems," he explains.

IPL 2026, for the first time, is projected to have more digital viewers than TV viewers, a tipping point that underscores how the platform itself has evolved. With influencer marketing expected to absorb 16-18% of total digital IPL ad spend, and the influencer budget alone projected at ₹700 crore, the creative weight of the season is dispersing across thousands of micro-moments and creator partnerships rather than concentrating in a handful of marquee campaign spots. That diffusion is by design, but it has come at a cost to creative cohesion.

Sah adds that cost efficiency is also part of the equation. "Brands now have multiple ways to reach the same audience, often even before the match begins, through retargeting, notifications, and personalized messaging, so IPL is no longer the single focal point of communication. Add to that the rising costs — it's an expensive platform where multiple competitors are fighting for attention in the same break, often leading to clutter and even interrupted viewing experiences."

Creative fatigue, he argues, is also accelerating the forgetting. "IPL runs for over a month, and unless a brand has the budget and planning to create multiple variations, a single ad quickly becomes white noise and gets ignored. That level of sustained investment — across production, media planning, and creative refresh — isn't something every brand is prepared for." Research from IPL 2024 and 2025 has shown that sustained presence across the tournament consistently outperforms one-time big-ticket spends, but sustained creative presence is a very different thing from sustained media buying.

The timeline trap

If fragmentation is a structural problem, timeline is an operational one, and it may be the most correctable. The industry has a well-documented habit of treating IPL like a reactive event rather than a planned campaign. Khazanchi is direct about what this costs creatively. "There's often a knee-jerk reaction from clients — IPL is approaching, so they want an ad ready in two or three weeks. That's simply not enough time to create something strategically strong. For any campaign to truly land, there needs to be a deeper conversation with the consumer, and without that, you might get attention, but not something memorable or meaningful for the category."

The best IPL campaigns on record (from Dream11's highly invested character-driven spots to CRED's surrealist celebrity work) were not built in three weeks. They were products of months of planning, creative development, and strategic alignment between brand and agency. The irony is that IPL's own media buyers have consistently advised brands to begin planning as early as November for a March start, noting that playoff inventory is often sold out eight to ten weeks before the final. Brands that take that advice on the media side and ignore it on the creative side are setting themselves up for the exact outcome the industry is currently observing: visible, but not memorable.

The ask behind the ask

Pathak points to one more shift that goes beyond timelines and formats, a change in who is actually controlling the creative conversation. "Digital has completely reshaped priorities — brands are reallocating budgets to platforms where they can target more precisely, rather than relying heavily on mass IPL exposure," he says. "Even when brands like Budweiser are active during the season, much of the spending is going into on-ground activations or alternative touchpoints rather than big, memorable TV spots."

The performance-led imperative has recalibrated what brands are optimising for. Impressions, click-through rates, conversion funnels, attribution windows: these are the metrics now sitting at the head of the table in brand reviews. Memorability, emotional resonance, and cultural salience that made ZooZoo, or Fevicol, or Amul culturally enduring don't have a clean column in a performance dashboard.

Khattri's challenge to the industry is blunt, and it's the right one to end on. "Ask anyone to name five recent ads they remember, and most will struggle, which says everything about the current state of advertising this season," she says. "Memorability comes from emotional connection — if your story doesn't stick, your visibility simply fades away." In a season where the media investment has never been higher, that is not a small problem. It is the only problem that matters.

Sah perhaps frames the industry's current condition most precisely: "The outcome isn't necessarily a lack of creativity, but a shift in strategy — ads are now just one part of a much larger, more complex communication mix." That may be true. But a communication mix without a creative anchor is not a strategy. It's an absence dressed up as sophistication. And in India's biggest advertising arena, absence is a very expensive thing to buy.