Zomato's IPL Topical Advertising Strategy

Executive Summary

Since 2019, Zomato has executed one of the most consistently inventive cricket-linked advertising programmes in Indian consumer marketing. Rather than pursuing conventional sports sponsorship — logo placement, athlete endorsements isolated from product — Zomato built a multi-layered IPL strategy that fused in-app gamification, contextual digital advertising, topical social media content, and television films into a coherent seasonal brand event. Each year's campaign evolved in sophistication: from a match-prediction gamification feature (Zomato Premier League, 2019), to real-time cultural commentary on social media, to team-specific contextual advertising across 900+ creative assets deployed on Jio Cinema's CTV feed (2024). The strategy is significant not just as advertising craft, but as a demonstration of how a food-tech platform can convert a national cultural moment into a structural business driver — turning the act of watching cricket into a cue for ordering food.

1. Industry & Competitive Context

The Indian online food delivery market in which Zomato operates is characterised by high competitive intensity, low brand switching costs, and a fundamental challenge familiar to all platform businesses: demand is episodic, not habitual. Consumers do not order food from Zomato every day by default — they do so when an emotional trigger, a specific occasion, or a contextual prompt fires. The strategic imperative for any food delivery platform, therefore, is not simply brand awareness but occasion ownership: establishing the brand as the default response to specific emotional and situational states. Zomato's principal competitor, Swiggy, operates in the same market with a comparable product offer. In a commoditised delivery landscape where platform differentiation on speed, price, or restaurant selection is quickly replicated, brand salience — the probability of being mentally activated at the moment of a food-ordering impulse — becomes the primary competitive battleground. This is the ecosystem into which Zomato's IPL strategy was deployed. The IPL itself is a marketing context of unusual density. As reported across industry sources, IPL viewership has grown from millions to hundreds of millions over the decade from 2010 to 2024. The 2024 edition on Jio Cinema alone recorded 510 million unique viewers, as cited in published industry analyses. The tournament spans approximately six to eight weeks, generates intense daily social media activity around each match, and creates a reliable pattern of co-viewing behaviour — groups of people gathered around a screen, often with food and beverages, across urban Indian households. For a food delivery platform, this is not simply a brand-awareness window; it is a direct behavioural context for conversion.

2. Brand Situation Prior to Campaign

Zomato was founded in 2008 by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah as a restaurant discovery and listing platform, pivoting into food delivery in 2015. By the 2019 IPL season — when Zomato launched its first structured cricket-linked gamification product — the brand had already developed a distinctive digital personality: irreverent, witty, and culturally plugged-in, expressed primarily through social media. This voice differentiated Zomato from more utilitarian competitors and from the generic promotional communication that dominated the food delivery category at the time. However, voice alone is insufficient brand infrastructure in a market where discounting drives significant volumes of short-term transactions. Zomato needed to convert cultural cachet into structural behavioural habit — to move from a brand that consumers found amusing on social media to a brand that consumers actively recalled and activated during high-engagement shared moments. The IPL presented the most scalable opportunity to accomplish this objective in the Indian market. Critically, Zomato had not yet established a celebrity brand ambassador relationship — the brand's personality was carried by its communication style rather than a specific human face. This changed with the appointment of Ranveer Singh as brand ambassador, confirmed publicly through official channels including an Exchange4Media report dated October 9, 2023. Singh's energy and mass appeal mapped closely to Zomato's desired brand personality, and his onboarding was timed precisely to coincide with the ICC Men's Cricket World Cup 2023 campaign — signalling a deliberate escalation in IPL and cricket-linked brand investment.

3. Strategic Objective

Zomato's IPL advertising strategy pursued three interlocking objectives that operated simultaneously across different time horizons.

The immediate objective was conversion: using the high-engagement context of IPL match-viewing to trigger food orders, particularly for group viewing occasions where order size and frequency are typically above the platform average.

The medium-term objective was occasion association: establishing an automatic mental link between the act of watching IPL cricket and the act of ordering from Zomato, such that "IPL → Zomato" became a conditioned brand-category response for millions of users.

The long-term objective was cultural embeddedness: positioning Zomato not as a utility brand (the cheapest or fastest delivery app) but as an essential part of the IPL experience itself — as indispensable to watching a match as the television set. As stated publicly by Sahibjeet Singh Sawhney, Head of Marketing at Zomato, in a quote carried by Storyboard18 (March 2024): "This campaign is an extension of our celebrated Cricket World Cup campaign, i.e. Match Ho To Zomato, which was born out of our love and respect for Team India. Celebrating the spirit of cricket and food in India — for Tata IPL 2024, we've created separate contextual advertisements for each playing team to truly address and celebrate India." This statement is strategically significant: it reveals that Zomato explicitly framed its IPL 2024 campaign as an extension of a prior cricket platform, not a standalone seasonal push — confirming that the brand was consciously building a multi-year cricket-linked identity, not opportunistically exploiting a single event.

4. Campaign Architecture & Execution

Zomato's IPL strategy is best understood not as a single campaign but as a platform — an evolving system of interlocking creative and product elements that have been iterated and scaled across multiple seasons. The architecture has four documented components.

Component 1: Zomato Premier League (ZPL) — In-App Gamification (2019–present)

The foundational element of Zomato's IPL strategy was not an advertisement but a product feature. The Zomato Premier League (ZPL), first launched during the 2019 IPL season, is an in-app prediction contest wherein users predict the outcome of IPL matches and earn discount coupons and cashback rewards for correct answers. Zomato integrated live cricket data into its app via a partnership with Roanuz Sports Data, an AI-powered sports technology company, to power real-time match statistics, toss information, and results.

The mechanic is documented across multiple published sources and Zomato's own official policy pages: users enter a prediction window opening one hour before each match and closing one minute before the match starts, answering three questions about match outcomes. Correct predictions unlock food order discounts and partner-brand coupons. ZPL was officially run during IPL 2022 (March 26 to May 29, as per Zomato's official ZPL Terms & Conditions policy page) and IPL 2023 (March 31 to May 28, per the updated ZPL Terms).

The 2019 launch results are documented in the Roanuz/Zomato partnership account published on the Roanuz blog and corroborated in Economic Times coverage: within the first week of ZPL's launch, Zomato reported over 120,000 active users, and over 4 million predictions were generated within the first three weeks of the feature's availability.

Component 2: Television and Online Video — The "Zomaito vs Zomahto" Platform (2023)

For the 2023 IPL season, Zomato's in-house creative team developed a television and digital video campaign around a single, self-referential brand conceit: the debate over how to correctly pronounce "Zomato." The campaign, conceptualised in-house and titled "Bhajji & Sreesanth Fight Again: Zomato v Zomato," featured former Indian cricketers Harbhajan Singh and Shanthakumaran Sreesanth — a pair with a well-documented on-field rivalry — recreating their famous argument, this time over brand pronunciation rather than cricket. As reported by Activative (January 2024), the spot debuted on April 11, 2023 and was accompanied by digital OOH featuring other cricket personalities including Hardik Pandya.

This campaign is an example of strategic intertextuality: Zomato did not need to invent a narrative. It borrowed the cultural memory of a famous cricketing dispute and repurposed it as brand-linked entertainment. The Harbhajan-Sreesanth feud was already loaded with emotional recall for Indian cricket fans; Zomato's creative team inserted the brand seamlessly into a pre-existing cultural memory, creating new brand associations at near-zero creative friction. The 2023 campaign also included a broader social strand of low-latency, match-linked content — posts and commentary timed to on-field events — which Activative's documentation of the campaign describes as "match-linked social content." Zomato's IPL app icon was also updated: for the duration of the 2023 season, the standard home delivery icon on the Zomato delivery map was replaced by an IPL stadium icon, with the in-app message: "Make Your Home, Your Stadium! Watch TATA IPL on Star Sports Network." This move turned the functional delivery map into an ambient promotional surface, as documented by Activative.

Component 3: The ICC Cricket World Cup Extension — "Match Ho Toh Zomato" (2023)

Following ZPL's IPL season, Zomato formally named and extended its cricket platform into the ICC Men's Cricket World Cup 2023. The campaign, titled "Match Ho Toh Zomato" ("When there's a match, it's Zomato"), featured Ranveer Singh and Chris Gayle in a watch-party setting. The narrative extended the Zomaito–Zomahto debate: the two cannot agree on the pronunciation until Zomato's delivery partner resolves it by declaring, "Ab Zomaito–Zomahto nahi, India-India ka time hai!" ("Now it's not about Zomaito–Zomahto, it's India–India's time!"). As documented by Storyboard18, Exchange4Media, and Social Samosa (October 2023), the campaign ran across major digital and offline channels nationally.

Simultaneously, Zomato launched a parallel AI-generated campaign leg: films in which Ranveer Singh and Chris Gayle name-checked individual restaurant partners and their signature dishes — a novel use of AI production to create personalised promotional content at scale for Zomato's restaurant partner ecosystem, documented across multiple trade publications including Exchange4Media and Storyboard18.

Component 4: Contextual Advertising at Scale — Tata IPL 2024 (900+ Assets)

The 2024 IPL campaign represented the most technically ambitious execution of Zomato's cricket strategy. As reported by Storyboard18 and Social Samosa (March 2024), Zomato created over 900 creative assets tailored to JioCinema's CTV (Connected TV) coverage of the 2024 Tata IPL. The campaign produced separate contextual advertisements for each of the ten playing teams, leveraging JioCinema's customisation capabilities across 12 languages. Viacom18 Sports Head of Revenue Anup Govindan confirmed the campaign in a statement to Storyboard18: "Zomato's campaign on JioCinema's coverage of Tata IPL 2024 is not only a testimony of unconventional creative communication but also the infinite possibilities on digital, showing just how far, wide, and deep brands can go with our custom feeds, 12 languages, and targeting offerings." Additional campaign elements for 2024 included a collaboration with cricketer Rinku Singh, in which his cricket bat was transformed into a canvas for Zomato messaging. AI-powered restaurant partner ads — featuring Ranveer Singh, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, and Cheteshwar Pujara — were produced by Zomato's in-house creative team and directed by filmmakers Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, as confirmed by multiple trade publications including afaqs (April 2024) and Marketing Moves.

5. Positioning & Consumer Insight

The consumer insight underlying Zomato's entire cricket strategy is deceptively simple and profoundly powerful: in India, cricket and food are not parallel cultural experiences — they are the same experience. Watching a match and ordering food are not separate decisions; they are a single behavioural bundle. The group viewing occasion — friends or family gathered, emotionally invested in the game, unlikely to leave for a restaurant — is structurally ideal for food delivery. Zomato recognised this not just as a promotional moment but as a positioning territory: if Zomato could own "cricket watching = Zomato order" as a mental association across enough seasons and enough touchpoints, the brand could effectively embed itself in a recurring national ritual. The strategic choice to name this position explicitly — "Match Ho Toh Zomato" — is a classic brand-occasion association play, similar in structure to Cadbury's "Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye" for celebrations. By articulating the occasion-to-brand link as a tagline, Zomato made the association explicit and memorable, creating a retrieval cue for deployment every time a user encounters an IPL match. The secondary insight is about belonging, not selling. Every element of Zomato's cricket communication — from the Harbhajan-Sreesanth debate to the delivery partner resolving the India-India call — positions Zomato as a participant in the cricket emotion, not an advertiser exploiting it. Zomato's delivery partners, brand ambassadors, and fictional characters all express genuine enthusiasm for Team India; the brand subordinates itself to the national cricket sentiment in its most visible campaign moments. This is an emotionally sophisticated brand position: a company willing to declare that "India–India is more important than Zomaito–Zomahto" builds consumer goodwill that no discount campaign can replicate.

6. Media & Channel Strategy

Zomato's IPL media strategy is documented as explicitly multi-channel and contextually calibrated.

Television and OTT: The brand maintained a Star Sports broadcasting partnership during IPL 2023, confirmed by Activative's documentation. The 2024 campaign was deployed on JioCinema's CTV feed — the primary digital broadcast platform for Tata IPL 2024 — using the platform's contextualisation tools across 12 languages and team-specific feeds.

In-App (Owned Channel): The ZPL prediction contest ran inside the Zomato app, converting the platform itself into a cricket engagement channel. The delivery map icon was swapped for an IPL stadium icon in 2023, converting a functional UI element into a brand expression.

Social Media (Topical/Reactive): Zomato's documented approach to social media during the IPL involves real-time content creation tied to match events. Industry analyses consistently identify Zomato's moment marketing capability as central to its IPL presence — posts calibrated to team performance, match outcomes, and cultural conversations within minutes of on-field events.

Outdoor and Digital OOH: The 2023 programme included digital OOH featuring cricket personalities, documented by Activative as part of the integrated campaign.

Influencer/Athlete Collaboration: Documented partnerships include Harbhajan Singh, Shanthakumaran Sreesanth, Hardik Pandya, Rishabh Pant (2023 ZPL promotion), Rinku Singh (2024 bat canvas), Chris Gayle (World Cup 2023), and Cheteshwar Pujara (IPL 2024 AI ads), across the campaign arc. The channel strategy reflects a deliberate logic: the owned in-app channel (ZPL) drives conversion; paid broadcast channels (Star Sports, JioCinema) drive reach and brand association; social media sustains daily cultural relevance during the six-to-eight-week tournament window; and athlete collaborations lend the campaign authentic cricket credibility.

7. Business & Brand Outcomes

ZPL 2019 Launch Performance: Over 120,000 active users within the first week; over 4 million predictions generated within the first three weeks of availability. These figures are cited from Economic Times coverage as reproduced in the Roanuz Sports partnership documentation and corroborated by Zomato's CMO Sandeep Anand's quote in The Statesman (April 2019): "Over four million people have played ZPL in the past three weeks and have collectively saved over eight crores so far while binging on their favourite food."

ZPL Scale: As documented by Talkwalker and industry sources, ZPL participation exceeded 4 million users within the first three weeks of the 2019 season. The contest was officially re-run in 2022 (per Zomato's official ZPL Terms) and 2023 (per the updated ZPL Terms).

IPL 2024 Campaign Scale: Over 900 creative assets produced and deployed on JioCinema CTV, across 12 languages and 10 team-specific feeds, as confirmed by both Viacom18's Anup Govindan and Zomato's Head of Marketing Sahibjeet Singh Sawhney in statements carried by Storyboard18 and Social Samosa (March 2024).

Company-Level Financial Context: Per Zomato's FY2024 Annual Report (filed May 13, 2024, signed by CEO Deepinder Goyal and CFO Akshant Goyal), consolidated revenue from operations for FY2024 was ₹12,114 crore, up from ₹7,079 crore in FY2023 — a 71% increase. The company reported a profit of ₹351 crore for FY2024, compared to a loss of ₹971 crore in FY2023, marking Zomato's first full fiscal year of profitability since listing. Consolidated B2C Gross Order Value (GOV) reached ₹47,918 crore in FY2024, a 48% increase year-on-year, per publicly reported financial analysis sourcing the annual report. No verified public information is available on the specific revenue or order uplift attributable exclusively to the IPL advertising campaigns, as Zomato does not report campaign-level financial attribution in its public filings.

8. Strategic Implications

A. Occasion Architecture is a Competitive Moat. Zomato's most enduring strategic achievement through its IPL campaigns is not any single advertisement or viral moment — it is the construction of a multi-season occasion architecture. By returning to the IPL with escalating creative ambition and structural consistency since 2019, Zomato has progressively deepened the mental association between cricket viewing and food delivery in the minds of its target consumer. This is what Byron Sharp would classify as category entry point (CEP) building — creating and reinforcing memory structures that associate the brand with specific behavioural triggers. Competitors cannot replicate this architecture quickly; it is the product of multi-year, multi-campaign investment.

B. The Product-Brand Integration Advantage. Most advertising campaigns build brand awareness but require a separate consumer action (searching, switching app, ordering) to convert. ZPL collapsed this gap: the gamification feature built into the Zomato app meant that a user engaging with the IPL campaign was already inside the ordering interface. This product-marketing integration — where the campaign lives in the conversion environment — is a structural advantage unavailable to brands operating outside their own digital platforms. The lesson for platform marketers is significant: the most efficient topical advertising is advertising that happens inside the product.

C. Contextual Advertising at Scale as Technological Differentiation. Zomato's 2024 move to produce 900+ creative assets for team-specific CTV targeting on JioCinema represents a meaningful evolution in how topical advertising is operationalised. This is not creativity at the margin — it is creativity at industrial scale, enabled by AI production tools and the contextualisation capabilities of digital broadcast platforms. The fact that Viacom18 chose to cite Zomato's campaign as a showcase for JioCinema's own platform capabilities suggests that Zomato was among the first major advertisers to fully exploit the contextual targeting infrastructure of India's new OTT sports broadcasting environment.

D. The Brand Voice as Competitive Infrastructure. Zomato's IPL campaigns are consistently produced in-house, and their creative quality — the Harbhajan-Sreesanth insight, the India-India resolution, the 900-asset contextual scale — reflects an uncommonly strong in-house creative capability. In a market where most brands rely on agency-produced work, Zomato's ability to execute topical advertising at IPL speed (match-linked social content within minutes of on-field events, seasonal campaigns iterated from the prior year's creative platform) is itself a competitive asset. Speed of cultural response is a brand capability, not just a media decision.

E. The Restaurant Partner Ecosystem as an Underappreciated Campaign Dimension. Zomato's AI-generated restaurant-partner ads in 2023 and 2024 — films where brand ambassadors name-check individual restaurants and signature dishes — introduced a new layer to the campaign: B2B brand communication disguised as consumer advertising. By using its IPL campaign to visibly celebrate restaurant partners, Zomato simultaneously built consumer brand salience and communicated partner value to the restaurant ecosystem. This dual-audience advertising — speaking to consumers and restaurant partners through the same creative — is a sophisticated use of a high-reach media window that most food platforms underutilise.

Discussion Questions

1. Occasion Ownership as Brand Strategy: Zomato has systematically pursued the "match ho toh Zomato" occasion association across multiple cricket seasons. Using the concept of Category Entry Points (Byron Sharp) or occasion-based positioning frameworks, evaluate how durable this association is, and what conditions could erode it. How should Zomato protect and extend this occasion architecture as competitor Swiggy executes its own cricket-linked campaigns?

2. The In-App Gamification Investment: The Zomato Premier League (ZPL) is simultaneously a brand marketing tool and an in-app product feature. Evaluate the strategic logic of investing in gamification as part of a topical advertising strategy. What are the risks of this approach — particularly around regulatory sensitivity to prediction-based contests — and how should Zomato manage them?

3. AI-Powered Personalisation in Advertising: Zomato's production of 900+ contextual assets for IPL 2024, including AI-generated restaurant-partner ads, represents a significant shift in how advertising scale is achieved. Analyse the strategic implications of AI production for brand consistency, creative quality control, and the economics of campaign production. Does scaling through AI strengthen or dilute the Zomato brand identity?

4. The Dual-Audience Campaign Architecture: Zomato's IPL campaigns serve two distinct audiences — consumers (who receive entertainment and ordering incentives) and restaurant partners (who receive branded visibility). Evaluate this dual-audience approach as a platform marketing strategy. What are the tensions between consumer brand value and partner ecosystem value, and how should Zomato manage them in future IPL campaigns?

5. Attribution and Marketing ROI in Topical Advertising: Zomato does not publicly disclose campaign-specific revenue attribution. As a CMO advising on future IPL marketing investment, construct a framework for measuring the full value of Zomato's IPL advertising strategy — including brand equity impact, occasion reinforcement, partner ecosystem value, and direct conversion — given the structural difficulty of isolating topical campaign effects in a multi-touch consumer environment.