Most brands treat IPL advertising like a slot machine. Pay enough, show up enough times, and something sticks. Asian Paints didn’t do that. What they did instead is worth understanding carefully, because it reveals a principle that most marketing teams completely ignore when the cricket season rolls around.
Let’s break it down.
The Problem With IPL Advertising
The Indian Premier League attracts over 500 million viewers across its two-month run. Brands know this. So they pour money in. BCCI’s media rights deal with JioCinema and Star Sports crossed ₹48,390 crore for the 2023-2027 cycle, the most expensive sports broadcast deal in Indian history. That money doesn’t appear out of thin air. It comes from brands paying extraordinary rates to reach an extraordinary audience.
The result? An advertising environment so cluttered it’s practically noise. Every break has the same brands shouting the same things at the same audience. Dream11. Cred. Byju’s (before the wheels came off). The same celebrity faces, the same high-energy cuts, the same manufactured urgency.
In this environment, the default strategy is volume. Buy more spots. Spend more. Outshout the competition. Asian Paints took a different approach entirely.
What Asian Paints Actually Did
Asian Paints used IPL not as a broadcast medium but as a cultural moment. Instead of buying air time to push product features, they built campaign narratives that used cricket’s emotional architecture as the canvas.
The insight driving this was simple and devastatingly accurate: IPL isn’t really about cricket. It’s about families gathered around a screen, neighbourhoods erupting when a wicket falls, fathers and sons and grandparents sharing something that transcends generations. The actual sport is almost secondary. The primary product being consumed is shared emotion.
Asian Paints makes paint. Paint is what your walls are covered in. Walls are where your home happens. Home is where those IPL moments occur. The connection isn’t just logical. It’s emotional architecture built around the same feelings that make cricket resonate in India in the first place.
This isn’t accidental. Asian Paints has spent decades positioning itself not as a paint brand but as a home brand. “Har ghar kuch kehta hai” (Every home tells a story) has been the backbone of their brand language for years. IPL gave them a real-time cultural stage to activate that positioning at scale.
The Execution: Why It Worked Where Others Fail
There are three specific execution choices that separated the Asian Paints approach from the noise around it.
Restraint in a medium that rewards loudness. IPL advertising defaults to high energy, celebrity saturation, and aggressive call-to-actions. Asian Paints went quieter. More human. The tone felt like a conversation rather than a broadcast. In an environment where everything is turned to eleven, turning it down to six is the loudest thing you can do.
Consistency of brand language. The campaign didn’t abandon its brand DNA to fit the IPL context. It brought the IPL into the brand’s world rather than contorting the brand to fit IPL’s energy. This is a mistake most brands make. They think the medium requires them to become something different. Asian Paints understood that coherence at scale is far more valuable than short-term relevance.
Platform-native thinking. The campaign wasn’t built for TV and then shoved onto digital. Each touchpoint was considered separately. The longer emotional films for YouTube. Shorter, sharper cuts for mid-match breaks. Social formats designed for second-screen behaviour during live matches. According to data from TAM AdEx, brands that develop platform-native assets rather than repurposed TVC cuts see 30-40% higher recall scores in post-campaign research.
The Numbers Behind the Feeling
Let’s not be sentimental about this. Campaigns aren’t run to generate warm feelings. They’re run to build brand equity and ultimately drive revenue.
Asian Paints reported consolidated net revenue of ₹34,489 crore in FY2024, representing a brand that has maintained category leadership in Indian decorative paints for decades. More relevantly for this analysis, their brand health metrics during and after major IPL campaign periods show consistent improvement in consideration scores among young urban homeowners – the exact demographic that drives home renovation decisions.
The ROI of brand advertising is notoriously difficult to isolate. But the pattern is clear enough: consistent, emotionally resonant brand advertising sustained over multiple IPL cycles has contributed to Asian Paints maintaining a market share of approximately 55% in the organised decorative paints sector in India, according to industry reports from ICICI Securities. In a commoditised category where the product differences are marginal, that number is almost entirely a function of brand work.
What Everyone Else Is Getting Wrong
Here’s what the Asian Paints approach exposes about standard IPL advertising strategy.
Most brands treat IPL as a reach play and nothing more. They buy eyeballs. They count impressions. They measure GRPs. None of this is wrong, exactly, but it misses the deeper opportunity. IPL is not just a large audience. It is a large audience in a specific emotional state, sharing a specific cultural experience, with elevated receptivity to brands that understand that experience.
Brands that show up with generic product ads are burning money to reach an audience that is actively looking for reasons not to pay attention during the break. Brands that understand the emotional context of the moment, and build creative that earns attention rather than demanding it, get a fundamentally different return on the same media spend.
This is the lesson. Not the specific execution choices Asian Paints made, but the underlying principle: the medium is the context, not just the channel. The brands winning in IPL advertising right now are the ones who understand cricket’s role in Indian emotional life and build campaigns that are worthy of that context.
The Verdict
Asian Paints didn’t crack IPL advertising with a bigger budget or a more famous celebrity. They cracked it by understanding something most brands refuse to sit with long enough to absorb: in a cluttered advertising environment, the most disruptive thing you can do is be genuinely human.
The campaign is worth studying not just for what it did in the IPL context, but for what it demonstrates about brand strategy at scale. Consistency compounds. Emotional relevance outperforms rational persuasion. And the brands that understand the cultural architecture of a moment will always outperform the ones just buying space in it.
That’s either genius or it’s obvious. If it feels obvious, ask yourself why most brands aren’t doing it. Then you’ll understand why Asian Paints keeps winning.
For the cautionary counterexample, read our full breakdown of how Snapdeal spent heavily on advertising while the product experience was actively failing customers — and what it cost them.
For more on how Indian brands are navigating advertising in complex media environments, read our breakdown of how food delivery apps engineer your spending behaviour. The principles overlap more than you’d think.
