- Swiggy leveraged real-time moments for effective advertising.
- The campaign utilised mobile-first, vernacular strategies for engagement.
- Results included a significant rise in app sessions and downloads.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) is one of the most saturated advertising environments in the country. The brand challenge year on year is to cut through predictability and avoid creative fatigue. Swiggy, one of the largest on-demand convenience platforms, and PivotRoots understood early on that simply being louder or more frequent wasn’t enough; relevance had to replace repetition.“The only way to stand out was to appear exactly when something meaningful happened in the match, making the communication feel like a natural extension of the viewing experience rather than an interruption,” shares Mayur Hola, VP Brand, Swiggy with ET Brand Equity. In the 2024 edition of the IPL, Hola and his team decided to use the tournament as a business accelerator, not just a visibility playground. The focus was to drive app sessions and orders, pan-India, with a specific focus on Southern markets. PivotRoots helped the brand tap into live match moments, without being present at live matches, or relying on sponsorships or celebrities.According to Praveen Joshi, managing partner – digital, PivotRoots, large cultural moments are powerful business drivers when approached with the right strategy, and they offer much more than visibility opportunities. “We focussed on building a data-led creative approach that allowed the campaign to stay responsive as the league unfolded. By combining audience insights with agile creative thinking, we ensured the brand could participate in the live conversation in ways that felt relevant and seamless,” he added.The big ideaThe idea stemmed from the second screen syndrome. The brand and the agency observed that while the match plays on TV, the real action shifts to the phone, checking memes, reels, scores, and food apps. The second screen had become the primary decision screen, especially for food, making mobile the most powerful touchpoint during live matches.The campaign was built around real-time emotional peaks in matches and paired with mobile-first, vernacular creatives that triggered instantly. “This allowed us to convert fleeting excitement into immediate action while keeping communication highly local and relevant,” says Hola.They observed that most IPL communication in the region was generic, pre-produced, and largely uniform across markets, with little distinction between regions or languages. While brands were present around the tournament, few were present within the match itself in a meaningful way. Hola further adds, “There was a clear gap in communication that could respond in real time to live moments, emotions, and shifts in momentum. Swiggy identified an opportunity to own moment-led, vernacular communication that felt alive, timely, and directly connected to what fans were experiencing on-screen. This allowed us to move from passive visibility to active participation.”The results? The brand and agency tracked reach, CTR (Click-Through Rate), app sessions, and cost efficiency. The campaign delivered a 1.8 per cent CTR on Meta and 3.15 per cent on Google Display, surpassing all its past benchmarks, generating a massive rise in app sessions, and driving an uplift in app downloads, indicates Hola.Building on real-time relevanceHola observes that mobile dominates attention, vernacular language drives trust, and engagement peaks mid-match. This, according to him, shaped the campaign that was mobile-first, language-native, and active only during live match windows rather than running all day.“We moved beyond static topical messaging by building a system that could react instantly to live match events. HockeyCurve integrations enabled creatives to update in real time on Meta and RTB platforms, turning moment marketing into a scalable, performance-driven engine rather than a branding tactic,” he concludes.Swiggy and PivotRoots won a Gold for this campaign at the ET Shark Awards 2025.
