Call Me Chunky has rolled out a new IPL-linked campaign that leans heavily on humour and snackable digital storytelling to capture audience attention during India’s biggest annual advertising window. The campaign uses light-format comedy and culturally familiar cricket-viewing moments to position the brand within the high-frequency consumption behaviour associated with the tournament season. The timing is strategic. IPL has evolved into one of the country’s most crowded marketing environments, where challenger brands increasingly struggle to compete with large-budget advertisers for visibility. For emerging food and beverage players, humour-led digital content is becoming a cost-efficient alternative to celebrity-heavy campaigns.
Humour as a Survival Strategy in IPL Advertising
The campaign reflects a broader shift in how smaller consumer brands approach cricket-led marketing. Instead of attempting scale parity with large FMCG or fintech advertisers, brands like Call Me Chunky are focusing on culturally adaptive content designed for social sharing and meme circulation. The objective is not mass reach alone, but memory retention within younger digital audiences. This also aligns with changing content consumption patterns during live sports events. Viewers increasingly engage with parallel second-screen behaviour — memes, short videos and reactive social content — alongside the match itself.
What This Means for Marketers
For agencies and media planners, the campaign underlines how IPL advertising is fragmenting. Television visibility still matters, but digital-native brands are increasingly prioritising contextual humour, creator partnerships and platform-specific storytelling over expensive broadcast dominance. The approach also reinforces the growing importance of agility in campaign production. Real-time relevance now often outperforms polished long-format advertising during cultural events.
Our insight
IPL marketing is no longer only a spending game. Increasingly, it is a speed-and-cultural-context game.