To promote its own stamina-imparting powers, beverage brand Boost created a new metric for sports media outlets to use in gauging athletes' stamina.
Objective:
Boost is one of India's leading malt-based brown MFD (Milk Food Drinks). Launched in 1975, it is a $170 million brand and has a market share of 11 percent (across India). The brand has a very strong market play in the southern region of the country and is the single largest milk food drink with a penetration of 50 percent in this area.
In August 2020, Boost decided to make the switch from a regional-only presence to a national launch. The question was how to make the brand more relevant and deliver impact with its core target.
Boost wanted to create a scalable and sustainable property to communicate beyond its regular advertising to reinforce and capitalize on its key selling point of offering "stamina." Its objective was to build a salient, stronger, and quicker brand association even in the northern and western regions of India.
Target Audience:
For over four decades, Boost's scientifically proven "3X stamina" formula has helped kids improve their stamina. The brand has consciously and successfully built a strong association with cricket by enlisting brand ambassadors like Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni, and Virat Kohli. The brand's aim has been to make itself synonymous with cricket, a shrewd play in India, where 90 percent of the world's one billion cricket fans live.
Indian cricketers are known for their stamina and high fitness levels, inspiring kids to idolize them. Boost's core targets were these young cricket fans across India.
Creative Strategy:
Though there are various performance ratings in the sports world, none quantify stamina. One can measure speed and heart rate in real time, but there is no real measure for a person's stamina.
Enter the "Boost Stamina Meter" (BSM), a first-of-its-kind rating system that ranked players, in real-time, based on their stamina on the field.
A multivariable linear regression model was trained using historical data to crunch over 30 deep level data points that indicated stamina — measurables like running between wickets, time spent on the pitch, and diving catches — to arrive at a stamina score for each player. The automated API used a push mechanism every two seconds to update and deploy real-time stamina scores for all players during a live match across streaming platforms (OTT), cricketing publishers (apps), and social media.
Context:
Data and analytics are now deeply integrated in fans' appreciation of cricket. Fans have also been exposed to data storytelling through various performance ratings like MRF Cricket Rankings and CEAT Cricket Ratings.
Despite numerous global rating systems in other sports, like Hollinger Statistics (NBA), NFF Powergrades (NFL), and many more, no sport, broadcaster, or brand had quantified stamina.
BSM is a data-driven product that illuminates the brand proposition in a novel and exciting way during cricket tournaments, resulting in a data-packed, analytical "Stamina Leaderboard" — live, in real time.
Overall Campaign Execution:
India is a mobile-first country with digital consumption growing on the back it. The ability to consume entertainment on-the-go has been enabled and massively expanded with mobile devices. A high-octane tournament like IPL (Indian Premier League), the Superbowl of India, has recorded over 300 million concurrent viewers with 90 percent of consumption taking place on mobile devices using streaming platforms.
While the world at large is binging on content on-demand, live sports is one of the only genres still viewed by appointment. Fans cannot afford to miss a good shot or a crucial wicket. Given this fact, being relevant and at-the-moment is highly imperative.
A mobile-first strategy was critical to Boost's approach, with 100 percent of the media budget allocated toward it. The company launched BSM on the biggest OTT platform and official streaming partner of IPL, Disney+ Hotstar (on which mobile consumption makes up 94 percent of all consumption), and on the biggest digital cricketing app, Cricbuzz (on which mobile consumption accounts for 87 percent of all consumption).
In addition, Boost's social media strategy was tailored to target the audiences geographically. As the teams represent various regions of the country, fans from those regions were targeted during their respective teams' matches.
Mobile Execution:
Sports as a medium lends itself organically to moment marketing, in which timing is crucial. In this approach, it becomes important for brands to churn out creative during high points in a match.
To achieve this end, a centralized API was linked to both platforms — Disney+ Hotstar and Cricbuzz — powering them with a live feed of real time stamina scores, making it a key statistical metric for player performance.
Boost deployed the data from BSM in several ways.
Across seven weeks and 60 matches, Boost made the BSM synonymous with "stamina" for its core audience of parents and kids by leveraging the Indian Premier League. Boost also made stamina a part of fan conversations through the BSM.
The campaign:
