India is a cricket-loving nation and Indian cricket is an evergreen favourite.
Neville Bastawalla intends to expand this horizon with his marketing efforts, and has been at it since the beginning of 2019, when he started his role as the Head, Marketing & On-Air Promotions, Sports Business, Sony Pictures Networks India (SPNI), in a bid to cement Sony Pictures Sports Network as a global multi-sports arena.
“The challenge is to modify these global sporting events, which millions and lakhs of people watch globally, for the Indian viewers. It’s important to understand why it is not connecting and cutting ice in India. These were the kind of questions we started looking at in the month of January, saying how do we grow the sports pie in the entertainment space,” says Bastawala.
The solution, according to Bastawala, is “Massification,” wherein awareness needs to be increased in a country where 70% of sports viewership comes from Indian cricket, and the remaining is from its international counterparts, and other sporting events such as WWE, and Kabbadi. Even the world’s biggest league football event UEFA Champions League is yet to gain favour among viewers.
“The idea is to build a sports community in India. Keep the existing community engaged, and keep building it further,” says Bastawala, adding, “What will work really well is driving relevance to this viewing why watch this, through creating localization.”
