What JioStar–Nielsen’s IPL cross-screen study means for your next live sports media plan

New Delhi: JioStar and Nielsen claim to have cracked one of the biggest pain points in sports media planning: how much of a brand’s money is actually reaching new people when it buys across TV and digital.

In an interaction with BestMediaInfo.com, Anup Govindan, Chief Revenue Officer – Sports, JioStar, and Akhil Parekh, Chief Product Officer, Nielsen, said their new cross-screen measurement study for IPL 2025 shows that fewer than 5% of ad exposures overlapped across linear TV (LTV), connected TV (CTV) and mobile.

For advertisers who have long assumed heavy duplication between TV and digital, the partners said this is a “game changer.”

Govindan said the objective was clear from the start: to transform the way live sports advertising is planned in India, moving it away from siloed TV and digital decisions to a unified, data-driven framework.

“For the first time, we can scientifically demonstrate how brands can drive incremental reach across live sports without wastage or overlap,” he said, calling the exercise a blueprint for the future of sports advertising. “It proves that a cross-screen strategy on JioStar platforms can maximise efficiency and value for advertisers.”

Parekh said the collaboration delivers “unprecedented clarity” on how audiences are reached across platforms.

“We are proud to partner with JioStar on India’s first deduplicated cross-screen measurement study,” he said. “This gives brands a clear, independent view of how TV and digital work together and helps them plan and optimise investments across both.”

Five brands, diverse categories, one unified view

The study was conducted during IPL 2025 across five large advertisers from very different categories, including FMCG, beverages, consumer durables, automobile and fintech.

The mix covered both high-frequency, impulse-driven products and high-investment, consideration-heavy categories, which Govindan said was intentional so that the findings could be “broad-based and widely applicable” across the advertiser landscape.

On the measurement side, Nielsen combined its digital trackers for CTV and handheld with BARC television data and its proprietary deduplication analytics to build a single view of audiences. The result is a framework that, in theory, lets an advertiser sit above TV and digital and see how many people it actually reached, how often, and where duplication crept in.

Till now, brands could only look at BARC for TV and platform or third-party numbers for digital in isolation. “Both measurements were happening independently,” Govindan said. “There was no unified measurement platform where an advertiser could compare how linear TV and digital performed together and how many people actually saw their ads across all platforms during IPL.”

The cross-screen study, he said, is the first time a unified, deduplicated view of ad exposure has been made available for a major live sports property in India.

What ‘under 5% overlap’ really means

The topline finding, less than 5% duplication in ad exposure across TV, CTV and mobile, has already raised eyebrows among marketers who intuitively expect much higher overlap.

Govindan clarified that while IPL content audiences obviously overlap across platforms, the key metric here is people who actually saw the same brand’s ads across multiple screens.

In other words, the same viewer may watch IPL on different devices over the season, but at any given point in time they are on one screen, not three. The framework is built around that behaviour.

“At any point in time, you will be watching on one platform,” Govindan explained. “If someone is on a handheld during the commute, you serve the ad there. When they switch to CTV or linear at home, you can plan how you want to use that screen. That’s how this framework helps advertisers. Brands can plan their campaigns to reach people on whichever screen they are on at that moment, rather than bombarding the same people blindly.”

Parekh added that this is precisely the kind of transparency brands have been asking for. “Advertisers want to know where their money is going, how much reach they are getting and what wastage looks like,” he said. “This is the first time we are bringing TV and digital together in a single, independent measurement and then using it to show overlap and incremental reach in a way that is actionable for planners.”

20-40% incremental reach at controlled frequency

Across the five brands and categories, JioStar and Nielsen found that cross-screen media plans combining TV and digital added 20-40% incremental reach over and above single-screen plans.

Crucially, Govindan pointed out, this incremental reach came without pushing frequency into wasteful territory.

He illustrated it with a simple planning example. If an advertiser’s objective is to reach 100 people with a frequency of eight exposures, and duplication remains low, then adding another 20–40% audience through smart cross-screen planning means 120–140 people can be reached at broadly the same frequency.

“That’s the ideal mix advertisers look for, i.e., more people at the same effective frequency, not the same people seeing your ad 20 times,” he said.

The study also shows how advanced targeting on digital can push duplication even lower. While most brands saw under 5% overlap in ad exposures, one premium fintech advertiser that used sharper targeting parameters on digital, such as device type and high-definition feeds on TV, reduced duplication to around 1%.

“That’s where the power of combining scale and targeting really comes through,” Govindan said. “TV gives you massive scale. Digital lets you sharpen who you reach. When you leverage them intelligently, you get very high incremental reach and very low duplication.”

Mass brands, premium brands and the ‘spillage’ question

Nielsen and JioStar are careful to say there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Different categories will use the framework differently.

For mass brands, such as a large passenger car maker or a cola that genuinely wants to speak to “everyone,” some level of spillage is acceptable as long as overall reach and impact are high.

“Some advertisers are okay with spillage because they’re targeting the entire mass market,” Govindan said. “The strategy works for them, and within those limitations they know how to utilise the platforms.

What this study does is give them data points to make that utilisation sharper.”

At the other end of the spectrum are premium and niche brands, including high-end automobiles and wealth and portfolio management fintechs.

“For a Rs 50-lakh car, reaching out to people who simply cannot afford to buy it is pure wastage,” Govindan said. “With this framework and the platform capabilities, such brands can narrow down on specific device types, HD feeds, and audience segments so that their cross-screen plan is as tight as possible.”

From his vantage point, Parekh said the insight is that the framework can address both ends of the market.

“You have very mass, top-of-the-funnel brands and you have very premium brands,” he said. “The idea is to give both segments independent, transparent measurement so they can plan the mix that works for their objectives.”

From custom study to product, with BARC in the loop

While the IPL 2025 project was executed as a one-off study for five brands, both JioStar and Nielsen say the intent is not to remain in “custom project” territory.

Earlier in the year, they had already launched a digital ad measurement solution for IPL that gave advertisers deduplicated reporting across digital devices. The cross-screen exercise is being positioned as the next logical step: adding CTV and tying everything back to linear TV.

“We are not in the business of doing bespoke, one-time studies,” Parekh said. “We are building a product. BARC represents linear TV, and we already have digital capabilities. We are working with all ecosystem players, including BARC, to productise these cross-screen capabilities so they become available to all advertisers, not just the five in this study.”

He underlined that brands will not get another confidential, brand-specific report on demand. Instead, JioStar and Nielsen will use learnings from the pilot to generate category-level views that can act as reference points.

“Fintech advertisers will be able to see how the fintech brand in this study used different platforms,” he said. “Automobile and durables brands will see what cross-screen strategies delivered for their category. It becomes a playbook for the new way of buying sports.”

Govindan added that the five participating brands are already using their private reports to recalibrate future sports plans, and he expects the wider market to follow as the framework is socialised.

“They’ve seen the data and are likely to increase the scale of investments in this new way of planning,” he said. “Once you show marketers credible data from a unified, independent source, change follows organically.”

Beyond IPL: Towards a live-sports measurement standard

While the study was anchored in IPL 2025, the scope is not limited to cricket or to one tournament. Govindan said JioStar sees “infinite scope” for such measurement across other marquee properties, from World Cups to bilateral series, and eventually across wider live sports.

“With the penetration of broadband and the way digital consumption is growing, sports viewing has become truly multi-screen,” he said. “The framework we’ve built for IPL can be expanded to other live sports as well.”

Parekh framed it as a step towards a standard for cross-screen live-sports measurement in India. “Ultimately, the goal is to have a unified, transparent framework that benefits all stakeholders—advertisers, broadcasters and digital platforms—by ensuring clarity and accountability,” he said. “This study shows that it is possible to deliver that at scale.”

For now, the partners are positioning the findings as both reassurance and provocation for marketers: reassurance that TV and digital, when planned together, are not cannibalising each other as much as feared, and provocation to move away from gut-feel splits towards evidence-led, cross-screen sports planning.

“As live sports continues to deliver massive scale and real-time engagement, advertisers can no longer afford to plan in silos,” Govindan said. “This is the starting point for measurable, unified audience planning across screens, backed by data, powered by reach, and optimised for impact.”