The Indian Premier League (IPL) continues to shatter records, not just on the field but also in the advertising arena. The 2025 season has witnessed a remarkable 29% increase in the number of advertisers compared to the previous year, with over 55 brands vying for attention during the first five matches alone.
However, with this vast opportunity comes significant risk. The surge in advertising can lead to overspending, ad fatigue among viewers, and an uptick in fraudulent activities targeting high-profile events like the IPL.
This blog explores how strategic implementation of ad monitoring, frequency capping, and fraud detection can be the difference between a successful IPL campaign and a costly misstep.
What will your brand get out of IPL advertising?
Here are the benefits your brand will get out of IPL advertising:
Fast Massive Reach
The Indian Premier League (IPL) isn’t just a cricket tournament—it’s a nationwide spectacle with a global fanbase. In the 2024 season, the IPL reached a cumulative audience of 546 million viewers on television alone, with digital platforms like JioCinema attracting an additional 620 million viewers. This unparalleled reach offers brands instant national visibility.
For brands, this means instant national visibility. Doesn’t matter if you’re launching a new product or driving top-of-funnel awareness, IPL advertising is your opening batsman—aggressive, high-impact, and out to make a statement from ball one.
In most media environments, building this kind of reach would take weeks, even months. With IPL, it can happen in a matter of days, sometimes even overnight. You’re not just reaching people—you’re entering living rooms, conversations, and social media feeds in real time.
Hyper-Engaged Audience
IPL viewers are not just numerous; they are deeply engaged. During the 2024 season, JioCinema reported that viewers spent an average of 75 minutes per session, up from over 60 minutes in the previous season. This substantial time spent indicates a highly captivated audience, providing brands with extended exposure and increased opportunities for message retention.
A neuroscience study revealed that during IPL 2024, viewers exhibited 1.2 times higher attention to ads on connected TVs compared to linear TV, and brand equity increased by 1.5 times on connected TVs. This heightened engagement translates to more effective advertising, as audiences are more receptive and responsive to brand messages during the tournament.
Better Brand Recall
Repeated exposure during the IPL significantly enhances brand recall. The tournament’s high-frequency matches and extensive viewership provide multiple touchpoints for audiences to internalize brand messages.
Integrating advertisements with specific in-game moments, such as boundaries or wickets, further amplifies recall. For instance, Cadbury Dairy Milk’s #ThankYouFirstCoach campaign during IPL 2024, which featured heartfelt tributes to cricketers’ first coaches, resonated deeply with audiences and reinforced brand association.
By now you’ve understood the massive opportunity IPL advertising is. But over the years, there’s been a marked increase in programmatic ad buys and real-time bidding (RTB). Platforms like JioCinema have enabled precise audience targeting, allowing brands to bid dynamically for premium ad slots in real time. While this opens up opportunities for better efficiency and control, it also intensifies competition.
With thousands of brands vying for the same inventory, standing out without overspending becomes a strategic challenge. The very speed and scale of programmatic — if not managed carefully — can lead to frequency spikes, wasted impressions, or audience fatigue. For smart advertisers, this creates an opportunity: those who can balance agility with optimization can win both attention and efficiency.
Ad Monitoring
With millions of impressions served in real time across multiple platforms, devices, and geographies, this is not the kind of campaign you can set and forget. Without active monitoring, you risk losing both visibility and impact.
Performance dips, under-delivery, missed geographies, or even incorrect creatives can all quietly eat into your campaign effectiveness. These aren’t just technical glitches — they’re lost opportunities in a media moment that’s all about timing and precision.
This is where our Ad Detection & Analysis on OTT solution comes in. Built for high-velocity environments like IPL, it enables brands to monitor every single impression with precision — across CTV, mobile, and OTT platforms.
The ad monitoring solution provides comprehensive ad tracking, detecting when, where, and how your ads appear. Whether it’s during a top-billed match or a weekday double-header, you get complete visibility into ad delivery across regions, languages, and content types.
It also offers Peak Viewership Heatmaps, helping brands align their ad placements with moments of maximum audience engagement — ensuring not just delivery, but visibility when it matters most.
Performance is benchmarked category-wise, allowing you to understand how your brand stacks up against others in your industry. Plus, with regional and language-based analysis, you’ll know exactly how your ads performed in key cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and across language feeds including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada.
In short, this isn’t just monitoring — it’s effective campaign intelligence, tailor-made for IPL-scale advertising.
Frequency Capping
With matches happening nearly every day and audiences tuning in across screens, the risk of overexposing your audience to the same ad grows rapidly. Too many impressions in a short span can lead to ad fatigue, reduced attention, and even negative brand perception.
This is where our Frequency Capping Management solution steps in. Built with IPL-scale dynamics in mind, it provides real-time control over how many times an ad is shown — per user, per device, per region, and even per campaign.
The platform checks every ad request against the cap limit before serving. If a device has already reached the cap, the ad is withheld — ensuring no overserving occurs. This allows for real-time protection against over-frequency, reducing media wastage and boosting campaign efficiency.
Brands can configure caps using multiple parameters:
- Publisher-based: Set distinct limits per publisher or apply a uniform cap across all.
- Geolocation-based: Adjust capping for different cities or regions.
- Campaign-based: Apply caps tailored to specific initiatives or objectives.
- Time-based: Control exposure over days, weeks, or months.
The system integrates seamlessly with ad servers and wraps creatives with a smart VAST tag that enforces these rules automatically — so you don’t just plan frequency, you enforce it at scale.
Detecting and Controlling Ad Fraud
With a high number of viewers, comes a high chance of ad fraudsters as well. Fraudsters see these spikes in attention and ad spend as prime territory for click fraud, impression laundering, device spoofing, and bot-driven traffic.
That’s why having a real-time, AI-powered ad fraud detection layer is no longer optional — it’s a must-have for brands advertising at IPL scale.
This is where our Brand Safety & Ad Fraud Detection suite comes into play. Powered by advanced AI/ML models, it monitors every ad interaction to detect suspicious signals — such as invalid traffic (IVT), bots, repeated clicks from single devices, or anomalies in geo and time-based behavior.
Clubbed with brand safety solution, it also enables brands:
- Conduct Real-time blacklisting of unsafe placements: Automatically prevents ads from appearing alongside inappropriate, irrelevant, or brand-damaging content.
- Validate content based on contextual and relevancy: Analyzes contextual signals like sentiment, topic category, and brand alignment to validate if the surrounding content is suitable.
- Access a Dynamic exclusion lists: Continuously updates unsafe environments using both predefined guidelines and live learnings to protect reach and brand equity.
- Monitor Regional brand safety detection: Goes beyond basic filters to flag vernacular and culturally unsafe content in regional contexts — an essential capability during pan-India events like IPL.
All of this is supported by the proprietary V.O.P. Framework (Verify, Optimize, Protect), which ensures that brand safety and campaign efficiency are embedded into every impression — not just after the fact, but before damage is done.
Moreover, Valid8, mFilterIt’s traffic validation engine, analyzes traffic quality across the funnel — from impressions to events and lead conversions. It detects invalid traffic such as bots, click farms, geo fraud, incentivized fraud, and more. This helps brands protect performance campaigns, reduce wastage, and ensure only high-quality users are being targeted and converted. Traffic is validated across web, app, and programmatic environments in real time — bringing full-funnel clarity to every impression served.
In short, mFilterIt doesn’t just detect fraud — it prevents it, safeguards your budget, and preserves the trust you’ve built with your audience.
Combining Monitoring, FCAP, and Fraud Prevention
Running ads during the IPL isn’t just about showing up — it’s about showing up smart. And the brands that win are the ones that manage to balance performance, efficiency, and brand safety — all at once.
That’s where the triad approach comes in:
Ad Monitoring + Frequency Capping + Fraud Prevention.
Together, these three levers form a complete strategy for IPL campaign success:
- Ad Monitoring keeps your visibility sharp, detects delivery issues in real time, and ensures you’re present across screens, regions, and key match moments.
- Frequency Capping protects your audience from fatigue and ensures every impression counts — not just in volume but in value.
- Fraud Prevention secures your media investments from bots, fake traffic, and unsafe placements, protecting both your budget and your brand.
Executing all this manually is nearly impossible at IPL scale. That’s why tools like mFilterIt’s ad monitoring and validation suite are built to simplify and automate this process.
From our OTT Ad Detection & Analysis dashboard to real-time FCAP enforcement and AI-powered brand safety, our stack helps brands gain control, improve ROI, and stay ahead of risks — all from one place.
Ready to make every IPL ad count?
Let’s talk about how you can drive performance, reduce wastage, and protect your brand during the biggest media moment of the year. Contact us today!
