If you think @unacademy @dream11 @CRED_club and the lot are burning money by sponsoring IPL, you don't understand how brand marketing works.

There are many conundrums that come with practicing my craft. Primary among them is "data-driven".

Impressions, views, likes, shares, are all token metrics, exercises in vanity.
(Yet, everyone wants these)

This is not to say no metric should be tracked. Every campaign has its core metrics, but holding a brand building team at gunpoint to these numbers defeats the very idea of a 'brand-building' campaign.

Events like IPL are as mass media as they come. What you get is a large captive audience and 50+ days of your brand in every thinkable medium: from digital to tv to print to social.

Trying to measure RoI for these campaigns is missing the forest for the trees.

Instead, getting the house in order before a campaign is live is far more important. Rally your leaders to engage more, make sure you have a pipeline of content across channels, ensure the website is simple, clean etc...:

Hygiene + compelling proposition.

Here's where we are: lot of marketing is social centric - and digital is notorious in this regard.

Doesn't matter if you have the best content, culture, product. If you can't market it, you can't go big.

IPL is big. More so in today's times.

From a brand marketing pov: Truth is, shifting perceptions are hard, long-term, and can add immeasurable value.

The only way to measure success is to first marry the founder's vision of the company with the creative process of the practitioner.

Brand marketing should then by entwined with product and people: Corporate + Employer Branding.

Then trust the team by providing the right resources - tools, people, budgets, authority.

Magic will happen. Slowly, but surely.