Connected TV Advertising: The New Opportunity for Brand Storytelling

Industry & Competitive Context

India’s media and entertainment advertising market crossed INR 2.5 trillion in overall revenue in 2024, growing 8.1%, according to the FICCI-EY report published in March 2025. Within this, digital advertising became the single largest contributor for the first time, reaching INR 700 billion and accounting for 55% of total advertising revenue, up 17% year-on-year. In the same period, linear television advertising declined by 6%, signalling a structural shift in how Indian advertisers allocate media budgets. The same report recorded that weekly active Connected TVs (CTVs) in India rose to 30 million in 2024, up from 23 million in 2023, confirming that large-screen streaming was moving from a niche behaviour to a mainstream one.

This shift was most visible around marquee live sports properties. During the 2023 Indian Premier League (IPL), which Viacom18 streamed free on JioCinema after acquiring digital rights for INR 23,758 crore for the 2023–2027 cycle, CTV advertising volumes grew sharply through the tournament. Data from TAM Media, cited by Inc42, showed that average CTV ad spots per match rose from 78 in the first week to 94 by the fourth week, a 20% increase, while average linear TV spots per match fell from 66 to 40 over the same period. JioCinema also reported that the IPL on CTV reached over 125 million unique viewers in 2023, with CTV viewership reported to be three times that of HD television viewership for the tournament. Industry estimates cited in the same reporting, from MiQ and Finecast respectively, projected that Indian CTV ad spend would grow from roughly $86 million in 2023 to between $395 million and $400 million by 2027, implying a compound annual growth rate in the 45–47% range, with CTV households in India projected to reach 100 million by 2027.

This competitive backdrop reshaped how large streaming platforms packaged inventory for advertisers. Disney+ Hotstar, which had run 13 CTV sponsors during IPL 2022, expanded its CTV advertiser base considerably by 2023, while JioCinema reported 25 sponsors for its 2023 season alone. Separately, reporting on JioCinema’s CTV inventory ahead of IPL 2024 described more than 40 advertisers using connected TV formats exclusively during the 2023 tournament, spanning international brands, financial services, e-commerce, automotive, and both B2C and B2B categories. It was within this fast-growing, increasingly competitive CTV advertising environment anchored by major cricket properties and a maturing large-screen streaming audience that brands such as Spinny, Croma, and OnePlus ran dedicated CTV campaigns on Disney+ Hotstar.

Brand Situation Prior to Campaign

Spinny is described, in Disney+ Hotstar’s own published account of the campaign, as a leading used-car platform in India. What is documented is the brand’s strategic read on its audience: cricket viewership in India skews toward affluent, urban consumers, a demographic Disney+ Hotstar’s published case study identifies as closely overlapping with Spinny’s target customer base for used-car purchases. This overlap between a premium, discretionary-purchase category and the demographic profile of large-screen cricket viewers formed the strategic rationale for Spinny’s media choice.

Strategic Objective

According to Disney+ Hotstar’s published account, Spinny’s stated objective was to increase brand awareness and favourability among cricket fans during two major 2023 cricket properties: the Asia Cup 2023 and the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023. No numeric target (such as a specific awareness lift percentage or reach goal) was disclosed in the source material. The objective was explicitly framed around brand-level outcomes awareness and favourability rather than performance metrics such as leads, conversions, or sales, which is consistent with the broader positioning of CTV as a brand-storytelling medium rather than a direct-response one.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

Spinny’s campaign used Disney+ Hotstar’s Connected TV advertising offering across both tournaments, maintaining what the source describes as a consistent presence through the Asia Cup 2023 and the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023. The creative was built around the tagline “It’s never just a car, go far,” and used emotionally driven, relatable storytelling centred on Indians’ personal relationships with their cars, rather than product-specification or price-led messaging. This is a notable creative choice: it leveraged CTV’s larger screen, sustained attention, and co-viewing context (families or groups watching cricket together on a television rather than a mobile device) to deliver a narrative-driven brand film, a format better suited to the living-room viewing environment than to short-form mobile advertising.

The campaign used a mix of two ad formats native to CTV inventory: mid-roll video ads inserted during match breaks, and CTV billboards, a high-impact, full-screen format typically shown at key viewing moments. Disney+ Hotstar’s targeting capability was used to focus delivery on affluent, urban cricket viewers, and the published case study states that Spinny’s campaign reached approximately 52% of the total CTV audience watching the two tournaments a reach figure disclosed by the platform, though without an independently verified methodology or third-party audit referenced in the source.

A comparable execution pattern is visible in Croma’s 2023 “Offers Aise Tyohar Jaise” festive campaign, also run on Disney+ Hotstar’s CTV inventory during the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023. Croma, a consumer electronics and durables retail chain, used two 20-second video creatives on CTV, timed deliberately to coincide with the Indian festive season, when, per the same source, household purchasing power is described as rising significantly. The stated rationale was that CTV viewing often happens as a shared, family activity, allowing Croma’s festive offer messaging to reach multiple household decision-makers simultaneously. Croma’s campaign targeted shoppers across seven major Indian metros Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai using Disney+ Hotstar’s targeting tools to reach this audience efficiently.

OnePlus ran a similarly structured campaign in 2022, using Disney+ Hotstar’s CTV offering during the T20 World Cup to promote the OnePlus 10 Pro, timed to overlap with the festive season smartphone upgrade cycle. OnePlus used 15-second custom-targeted CTV video creatives aimed at urban, affluent, digital-first adults aged 22 to 40, a segment the source describes as having high purchasing power and a tendency to purchase new phones around launch windows when promotional offers are common.

Across all three campaigns, the common architecture is consistent: a single large live-sports property as the media anchor, CTV-native ad formats (video pre/mid-roll and full-screen billboards) rather than repurposed TV spots, audience targeting layered onto a mass-reach property, and creative built for sustained attention and shared viewership rather than for scroll-based mobile consumption.

Positioning & Consumer Insight

The underlying consumer insight shared across these campaigns is that CTV combines two previously separate advantages: the reach and emotional engagement of television, and the audience precision of digital advertising. For Spinny, this meant pairing a premium-feeling, story-led brand film a format historically associated with television’s emotional register with Disney+ Hotstar’s ability to target delivery toward the affluent, urban segment most likely to consider a used car purchase, rather than broadcasting to an undifferentiated mass audience. For Croma, the insight was behavioural: CTV viewing is frequently a household, multi-viewer activity, which the brand treated as an opportunity to reach several potential decision-makers within one home during a single ad exposure, rather than the single-viewer assumption typical of mobile advertising. For OnePlus, the insight centred on timing and audience overlap recognising that the T20 World Cup’s CTV audience and the festive-season smartphone upgrade audience were substantially the same affluent, tech-engaged urban cohort, and that reaching them on the big screen, at a moment of high emotional engagement with cricket, supported top-of-mind recall ahead of a purchase window.

This positioning logic using a mass live-sport property as an attention anchor, then layering precision targeting and big-screen, story-driven creative on top of it is what distinguishes CTV strategically from both traditional linear television buying (reach without targeting precision) and mobile/performance digital advertising (precision without the emotional and attentional advantages of a shared, large-screen viewing context).

Media & Channel Strategy

All three campaigns used Disney+ Hotstar as the exclusive platform, with Connected TV as the specific inventory type, rather than a cross-platform or multi-publisher CTV buy. The media strategy in each case was anchored to a single marquee live-sports tournament (Asia Cup 2023 and ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 for Spinny; ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 for Croma; T20 World Cup 2022 for OnePlus), reflecting a broader industry pattern in which cricket tournaments function as the primary demand driver for CTV advertising in India. This is corroborated at the industry level: JioCinema’s CTV ad inventory during IPL 2023 showed measurable week-on-week volume growth (78 to 94 average spots per match across four weeks, per TAM Media data cited by Inc42), while linear TV ad volumes on the same property declined over the same period (66 to 40 average spots per match, per BARC data), indicating that advertiser demand was actively migrating toward CTV formats around live cricket specifically, not toward streaming video in general.

Business & Brand Outcomes

Disclosed, documented outcomes vary considerably in specificity across the three campaigns.

For Spinny, Disney+ Hotstar’s published case study reports a 3X increase in social media chatter around the brand and an 88% growth in positive sentiment associated with the brand during the campaign period. The source also states that the campaign delivered a brand favourability uplift, but does not disclose a specific percentage figure for this uplift, nor the measurement methodology, baseline period, or third-party verification source for any of these figures.

For Croma, the published source reports “significant uplifts” in Aided Awareness, Online Ad Awareness, Purchase Intent, and Brand Attribute metrics, but discloses no specific percentage figures, baseline comparisons, or independent measurement source for any of these claims.

For OnePlus, the published source provides no quantitative outcome data at all no reach figures, recall-lift percentages, or sales-related metrics are disclosed. The source states qualitatively that the campaign helped the brand achieve top-of-mind recall among potential phone buyers and allowed it to reach its target audience “at scale,” without supporting data.

Strategic Implications

Several implications follow from the verified facts above, interpreted at a strategic rather than descriptive level.

First, the shift in advertiser behaviour documented around IPL 2023 CTV ad volumes rising while linear TV volumes fell on the same property, within the same weeks indicates that Connected TV is not simply adding incremental reach to television budgets but actively substituting for linear inventory among advertisers pursuing premium, affluent audiences. This is consistent with the FICCI-EY finding that overall linear TV advertising revenue declined 6% in 2024 even as total advertising grew 8.1%, suggesting a genuine reallocation of budget rather than category-wide growth lifting all formats equally.

Second, the three campaigns reviewed share a consistent strategic logic: anchor to a single high-engagement live property, use CTV-native formats (not repurposed 30-second TV spots) built for sustained, shared-screen attention, and layer platform-level audience targeting on top of mass reach. This pattern suggests that CTV’s distinct value proposition for brand storytelling lies specifically in combining television’s emotional and attentional advantages with digital’s targeting precision a combination that neither pure linear TV nor pure mobile/performance digital advertising can replicate on its own.

Third, the disclosure gap evident across these case studies concrete numbers for Spinny (3X social chatter, 88% sentiment growth, 52% reach), vaguer qualitative claims for Croma, and no quantitative data at all for OnePlus is itself a notable pattern. It suggests that measurement standardisation for CTV brand outcomes (as distinct from reach or impression delivery, which platforms can report with more precision) remains inconsistent across advertisers and publishers, even within campaigns run on the same platform. This is a genuine strategic consideration for marketers: CTV’s targeting precision does not automatically translate into precise, comparable outcome measurement, and brands evaluating CTV investment should expect variability in what platforms are willing or able to disclose.

Fourth, the scale projections cited by industry sources Indian CTV households growing toward 100 million and CTV ad spend growing from roughly $86 million in 2023 toward $395–400 million by 2027, alongside global CTV ad spend forecast (by eMarketer, for the US market) to rise 22% to $30.1 billion in 2024 indicate that the strategic window for brands to build CTV-specific storytelling capability, rather than simply repurposing linear TV creative, is still opening rather than closing. Brands that develop creative and targeting approaches purpose-built for the large-screen, shared-viewing, addressable context of CTV are positioned to capture a growing share of a still-maturing advertising channel, ahead of it becoming as commoditised and competitive as linear television or mobile performance advertising already are.