A moment from The Dark Knight

At night, after the day’s IPL matches are over, switch to PPL, or HPL, or SSL. Only, what you’d be watching won’t be cricket. If you can’t beat ’em, ride piggyback on ’em. That is the strategy of the English movie channels this IPL season.

With the primetime 9pm band being drowned by a daily dose of T20 action, the channels are looking at 11pm as the new primetime and creating properties having synergies with the big bang sports league.

“IPL has captured the imagination of the nation. Naturally it eats into the TV universe across genres and channels,” says Jyotsna Viriyala, vice-president, Star Movies. “It would be foolish to believe that we can compete (with IPL). So we have thinned down activity surrounding the 9pm slot,” adds Shruti Bajpai, country manager, South Asia, HBO Asia.

Instead, the action — and the competition — is now surrounding the movie band that starts after the 9pm movie, and coincides with the conclusion of the late evening match.

“In our experience, English movies and news programmes, especially the former, gain in viewers after matches. At a time when we thought our channel share would fall, last year it actually increased. Other genres took a beating,” says Viriyala. “People want to watch something lighthearted after all the excitement,” explains Bajpai.

But it is not enough to beam a feel-good entertainer and expect post-match viewers to tune in. When IPL burst into the picture in 2008, none of the channels anticipated its impact on TV ratings. “That is why nobody could plan,” recalls PIX business head Sunder Aaron. Now, the channels are ready with a marketing strategy. “On the face of it, IPL was a bane. But we have turned it into a boon,” smiles Viriyala.

The trick has been to find what Bajpai calls “a clever name”. So her channel HBO launched Hollywood Premier League, just as PIX unveiled PIX Premiere League. “We wanted to be in the spirit of things,” says Aaron. “You also need robust content,” points out Viriyala.

Despite being inspired by the T20 tournament, the movie channels are sticking to their own turf. “We are celebrating IPL, but in a way we know best,” says Bajpai. Star Movies, with a Super Star League, has a sales pitch that goes: “What could be better than switching over to blockbusters of the biggest of Hollywood superstars after an exhilarating match of cricket?”

With big movies being dished out by rivals too, channels are on the lookout for a differentiator. In the contest of one-upmanship, HBO, which registered an 86 per cent rise in post-match viewership with HPL compared to its round-the-year 9pm ratings, has added cricket elements to cash in on the IPL hangover. A Scoreboard will track the movie’s scores at the box office and the award stakes, Googly will provide movie trivia, Fulltoss will indicate the best action scenes from HPL, and so on.

Buoyed by the 15 per cent rise in its late-night viewership last year, PIX is offering IPL tickets to viewers, capitalising on being part of the same family as Set Max, the official broadcasters. “All you have to do is watch the movie and answer the question of the day,” says Aaron.

If the names of the movie slots find resonance with cricket viewers, so do they with advertisers. “For IPL, advertising packages have been sold for Rs 30 crore, Rs 45 crore and Rs 50 crore respectively. Rs 30 crore entails one to 6,000 seconds through the length of the tournament, with 10-second spots during matches costing Rs 5 lakh. The Rs 50 crore-package gets one 10,000 seconds in the tournament and a co-presenter tag. But for retail advertisers looking to advertise in say five matches, the 10-second spots could go up to Rs 10 lakh,” says Soumya Ranjan Acharya, senior investment director of Nexus, a Mumbai-based media buying agency. Around 60 to 70 per cent of the money in the market is going into IPL-related advertisements. “The market has also grown. A company spending Rs 100 crore is now spending Rs 150 crore.”

What about the advertisers who cannot afford the steep match ad rates and yet want a slice of the IPL action? “Not everyone has deep pockets. Also, a lot of companies want to stay away from the matches as they fear being swamped. HPL helps give HBO a high recall value and gives these advertisers a reason to put their money in,” says Bajpai.

More cricket, more big movies. The man of the series? The viewer, of course.