Jerseys vs TVCs: Which drives real brand recall during the IPL?

The IPL has never just been cricket. It has always been a media property, a cultural event, and a 60-day advertising carnival rolled into one. But this season, something is shifting in how brands are choosing to show up.

The traditional 30-second broadcast spot, once the centerpiece of agency campaigns, is no longer the sole focus. Franchises now act more like content studios, producing reels, player-led challenges, comedy collaborations, and influencer integrations that engage audiences well beyond the four-hour match window.

The result is a more fragmented but also more interesting brand landscape. A fan watching a Kolkata Knight Riders reel featuring a popular stand-up comedian might not be in the mood for cricket at all, but they are engaging, sharing, and, crucially, associating. That association is the new currency.

Yet, for all the noise around social-first content, jersey sponsorships remain the most visible and most contested piece of the grand IPL real estate. A chest logo of the smartphone brand ‘Nothing’ on Virat Kohli's jersey across an evening match watched by millions of viewers is not something a reel can replicate. The question brands and agencies are now genuinely grappling with is: which of these formats drives recall, and which drives results?

Scale vs Stickiness

The traditional broadcast argument still holds numerical weight. What is in question is whether reach translates to recall. Increasingly, marketers are finding that it does not always.

Nikhil Gupta, Head of Strategy and Marketing at Signify Greater India, draws a useful distinction between visibility and integration, arguing that the latter is where durable memory is made. "Traditional advertising continues to play a critical role in delivering scale and reach," Gupta says. "It ensures presence across key moments and builds top-of-mind awareness quickly. However, what is increasingly shaping lasting recall today are design-led integrations — whether it is jersey placements, helmet branding, on-ground visibility, or contextual presence during high-emotion moments in the game."

Signify has put this thinking into practice by associating its emerging electrical brand EcoLink (a lighting and BLDC fans label) with the Rajasthan Royals and Sunrisers Hyderabad, with activations spanning on-ground branding, headgear placements, and digital integrations. "When a brand becomes part of the team ecosystem, it moves from being seen to being associated," Gupta adds, "and that's where deeper recall is built."

The logic is intuitive: a brand that appears on a helmet during a match-winning six carries emotional freight that a mid-over ad break rarely can. But this assumes the brand occupies premium visual territory on the kit, a condition that is becoming harder to guarantee.

Women's Cricket Changed the Merchandise Calculus

One place where jersey-as-identity is working powerfully is women's cricket, where the Women's Premier League has created a new frontier for brand and merchandise engagement alike.

Shreya Sachdev, Director Marketing at Puma India, speaks with the authority of a brand that has backed women's sport when scepticism was still the dominant sentiment. "For us as a sports brand, partnerships like the WPL go far beyond visibility or short-term marketing gains," she says. "They bring credibility and authenticity to what we stand for. If a brand claims to be truly rooted in sport, it cannot only support the biggest men's properties — it also has to invest in the broader sporting ecosystem, including women's sport."

The commercial proof of concept has arrived faster than most expected. "The response to WPL merchandise has been extremely encouraging," Sachdev notes, pointing to limited champions editions that sold out within hours of launch. More tellingly, she flags a shift in the profile of the buyer: "A few years ago, the data actually suggested that more men were watching women's sport than women. Today we are seeing that shift — more women are actively following leagues like the WPL, and that is visible in merchandise demand as well as stadium engagement."

One trend that signals a maturing fan base is particularly instructive: "The share of higher-priced authentic jerseys is increasing every year. Consumers increasingly want the same premium product that the players wear on the field."

The Jersey Clutter Problem

IPL jerseys have always been commercial documents, but they are reaching a point of diminishing returns. When ten or more sponsor logos compete for attention across a single garment, the hierarchy collapses. No individual brand benefits because none stand out.

Prithvi Bhagat, Founder of STRCH, a D2C apparel brand, makes the case with the directness of someone who has watched this dynamic from inside the merchandise economy. "IPL jerseys are losing Gen Z because of their design," he says. "Football club jerseys have clean lines, minimal sponsors, and a strong identity. People wear them as casual clothing, not just during matches. But IPL jerseys pack 10 different sponsor logos on every available surface — the team colours barely show through the branding clutter."

The commercial stakes behind this observation are real. Bhagat notes that "teams with cleaner, simpler jersey designs sell multiples more than teams with cluttered, sponsor-heavy kits." The tension he identifies is structural: "Design creates long-term value, but sponsorship revenue is short-term cash, and the IPL teams maximising sponsor placements are sacrificing merchandise potential with younger consumers who care about how clothing looks."

This is not a niche aesthetic complaint. Global football, the benchmark Gen Z applies to every sports property, has long understood that the jersey is a lifestyle product. Premier League clubs generate significant portions of their commercial revenues not from stadium sponsors but from kit sales to fans who wear them to cafes and concerts. IPL franchises, Bhagat argues, are leaving a meaningful slice of that culture (and that revenue) on the table.

Content is the new TVC

Beyond the jersey debate, franchises are making a structural shift in how they use their roster. Players, comedians, influencers, and celebrities are now cast not just in pre-season brand films but in social-first content formats that are designed to travel: challenges, reaction reels, behind-the-scenes series, comedy collabs.

The franchise, in this model, behaves less like a sports team and more like a media house that happens to play cricket. This matters for brands because it changes the geometry of where attention lives. A brand that is woven into a franchise's content ecosystem, rather than merely slapped onto its kit, has a far longer and more contextually rich presence across the season.

According to a report by the Broadcast Audience Research Council, digital viewership of IPL has grown at a compound annual rate of over 25% in the past three years, and the audiences consuming this content on phones are far more likely to encounter franchise-led social content than they are to sit through a linear ad break. This is the environment where content-based brand integration compounds, while logo-on-kit visibility risks becoming background noise.

Gupta frames the opportunity precisely: "Cricket is deeply embedded in India's cultural fabric, and the upcoming season offers an unparalleled platform for brands to connect with audiences at scale. In the IPL, visibility gets you noticed, but integration is what gets you remembered." The brands that will leave this IPL season with the strongest recall are likely those that understood very early that the real estate worth owning is not just the chest of a jersey, but a share of a story that fans are already telling themselves about their team.

Sachdev's philosophy at Puma offers perhaps the clearest articulation of how patient, principled brand-building works in this environment: "We do not believe in showing up only during a big moment or a winning season. If we decide to support a sport or an athlete, the idea is to be part of that journey for the long run and help grow the ecosystem around it."

In an attention economy defined by novelty, that kind of consistency is its own form of differentiation, and, ultimately, its own form of recall.