Talkwalker’s Battle of the Brands: Netflix Vs IPL

It’s the start of spring and we all know what that means - the battle of TV airspace! The two biggest players this season seem to be IPL and Netflix! It’s the 11th edition of the IPL and the tournament has grown to dizzying heights with a brand value of a whopping $6.3 billion (source: Times of India)! No wonder marketers all over the country are jumping onto the IPL bandwagon. But IPL has some serious competition - Netflix entered the Indian market with a bang and has shown exponential growth in the Indian market over the last couple of years. But the big question is, who will score a century - Netflix or IPL in this edition’s battle of the brands?

Talkwalker, a social media analytics company, based in Luxembourg, takes a closer look at the buzz, using their platform. It analyses the performance of mentions all over the internet and provides key metrics such as engagement, related themes, demographic data, geographic data and influencer data.

Mentions: Let’s look at pure mentions over the last 30 days. Unsurprisingly, IPL leads in the number of pure mentions as we’re getting closer and closer to the start of the season. But what’s surprising to note is IPL has short spurts and peaks of mentions while Netflix has a more constant (slow and steady) approach. Digging deeper, we notice that since the start of the year, Netflix still has an edge over IPL in the mentions game (174.2k vs 92.3k). IPL only started to come up since mid-February.