As India remains knee-deep in the cricket season, with the Men’s ICC T20 World Cup final scheduled for 8 March and the Indian Premier League set to run from 28 March to 31 May, the sport is poised to dominate screens across the country.

However, increasingly, the cricket experience is no longer limited to television broadcasts.

While the match plays out on TV or streaming platforms, the real-time conversation around the game unfolds across smartphones, through group chats, memes, reactions and fan commentary shared instantly among friends.

For platforms and advertisers, this behavioural shift is reshaping how brands engage with cricket audiences, and Snapchat is attempting to tap into it with ‘Cricket in a Snap,’ its new advertising offering designed around real-time fan engagement during the cricket season.

According to the company, 85% of Gen Z in India follow the IPL, making the cohort a major driver of cricket culture and consumption.

Snapchat cited that it now has over 250 million users in India, with around 90% belonging to Gen Z, a demographic that increasingly shapes online conversations around the sport.

The platform has also partnered with several IPL franchises, including Mumbai Indians, Gujarat Titans, Chennai Super Kings, Punjab Kings and Delhi Capitals, alongside sports publishers such as CricTracker and SportsYaari, and sports broadcaster JioStar, to build a cricket-focused content ecosystem.

Snapchat’s pitch is built around the idea that while TV delivers mass reach, the fan reaction layer increasingly happens on mobile platforms. The company said that more than 90% of Snapchat users second-screen during cricket matches, switching between the live broadcast and their phones to react to match moments in real time.

For advertisers, that behaviour signals a shift from traditional reach-based media buying to attention-driven engagement.

Through ‘Cricket in a Snap,’ Snapchat has introduced a set of new advertising formats designed to tap into these real-time moments. These include AR-based experiences powered by a Live Sports API that integrates live match data into branded lenses, immersive fan zones, post-capture stickers, and collaborations with creators on the platform known as Snap Stars.

The idea is to allow brands to participate in cricket culture as it unfolds, rather than appearing only during traditional advertising breaks.

At Snap Inc’s ‘Cricket in a Snap’ event in Mumbai, we spoke with Yagnesh Ravi, ad solutions lead, Snap Inc, India, about why Gen Z is redefining cricket culture, how ‘attention’ is becoming the new currency of advertising, and why the future of sports marketing may lie not just in the broadcast but in the conversation around it.

Edited excerpts:

Gen Z consumes cricket in many ways today, including live events and digital platforms. What gap did Snapchat identify that led to the launch of these cricket-focused solutions? And given that Gen Z spans a wide age range from 18 to early 30s with very different spending power, how do brands tailor their messaging to different segments within that audience?

Gen Z is the largest population group in the country, and about 85% of them follow cricket. They are, in fact, the driving force behind cricket culture in India today. On Snapchat, we have over 250 million users in India, and around 90% of them are Gen Z.

So, to your first question, Gen Z is driving cricket culture, and Snapchat is where Gen Z already is. What we noticed on the platform was very organic behaviour. Every time there was a cricket moment, whether a small in-match moment or something as big as a World Cup final, we saw spikes in snaps. That clearly indicated there was an opportunity for Snapchat to lean into this behaviour.

The second reason relates to the way advertising works on Snapchat. In a world where most advertising interrupts passive consumption, our formats are designed to be leaned-in and opt-in, driving active attention. We conducted a study with Lumen and WPP, which showed that simply adding Snapchat to a media mix can increase attention among Gen Z by about 22%. Our ad formats are built to drive that attention, and a high-intensity cultural moment like the IPL is a natural fit for that.

Another important factor is that Gen Z today drives about 43% of consumption in the country. Brands across categories are increasingly coming to us saying that Gen Z is central to their business. Brands are asking us how they can show up on the platform. Broadly, we see two types of brands: one group sees Gen Z as their core audience and wants to ensure they are present on Snapchat during this period. The second group is already investing heavily in cricket and looks at Snapchat as an attention multiplier, a way to complement passive advertising with leaned-in, high-attention experiences.

On the organic side as well, the scale has changed dramatically, with the number of cricketers too on the platform. We were at about 100 million users a few years ago, and today we are at over 250 million. At the same time, younger cricketers are becoming prominent and shaping the culture around the sport. That combination of scale, youth culture and attention-driven products made it a natural opportunity for us to lean in.

Coming to the second part of your question around different age cohorts within Gen Z, there are definitely categories where specific age groups matter more. Brands typically have a strong understanding of which cohort drives their category. Our platform allows them to customise communication accordingly. For example, a brand can choose to focus only on the 18–21 segment or target users aged 26–30.

Different categories see different kinds of traction across age groups.

Fashion is a good example where younger cohorts may be more dominant. But the larger point is that Gen Z overall drives about 43% of consumption today, which means it’s not a small niche audience that brands are dissecting too narrowly.

Across industries, brands recognise that Gen Z influences purchasing decisions directly or indirectly. Even a 16-year-old today can influence what car a family buys, so their impact extends across multiple categories and decision-making spheres.

You mentioned attention metrics earlier. Is that something Snapchat is already using as a key measurement framework, and given that much of this engagement happens through real-time conversations, how do you plan to measure success for brands this cricketing season?

With Lumen and WPP, we built a large attention ecosystem where we studied how different platforms and formats drive different levels of attention.

Advertisers are using this in two ways. First, for planning their campaigns. What we found is that attention has nearly four times the correlation with brand impact compared to VTR (view-through rate), which makes it a much stronger indicator because, in many ways, it reflects real human engagement with media.

Was it easier to convince brands that traditionally focused only on other digital platforms to include Snapchat in their media mix for the sport?

So brands use this data to design campaigns that optimise for attention rather than just traditional metrics. The second way is through post-campaign measurement, where we work with them to evaluate whether the attention delivered by a campaign was higher or lower than expected. In that sense, we support them both in planning and in measuring outcomes.

In terms of adoption, what we have seen is that many brands view Snapchat as something that complements their existing advertising rather than replacing it. For example, if a brand is already leaning into cricket through broadcast or other mass-reach channels, they often look at Snapchat as an attention multiplier. Our immersive, lean-in ad formats add another layer of engagement that amplifies the impact of those larger campaigns.

Snapchat offers formats that are quite unique to the platform, whether it’s the Live Score API, trigger-based ads in chat, post-capture stickers or other immersive experiences at scale. These formats simply don’t exist on most other platforms, which makes Snapchat a complementary extension to a brand’s broader cricket advertising strategy rather than a substitute for it.

During your presentation, you mentioned that a lot of Gen Z’s conversations happen in chats. When users are discussing brands in those spaces, does Snapchat share any aggregated insights or data with advertisers to help them understand those interactions?

Our ads in group chats are designed as an opt-in, lean-in experience. So if you receive an ad there, it appears through a very thoughtfully designed format that feels native to the environment rather than disruptive.

At the same time, we don’t share any data from private chats with advertisers. What we do instead is give advertisers the opportunity to be present in that space through formats that users choose to engage with. This ensures that while brands can reach audiences in their chats, user conversations and privacy remain protected.

Lastly, now that you’ve built this ecosystem around cricket, do you see Snapchat extending a similar playbook to other major cultural or sporting moments, such as the FIFA World Cup or other non-cricketing sporting events?

I think a lot of what we’ve built for the first time here can definitely be leveraged for other cultural moments as well. On occasions like Holi, for example, people come to Snapchat to capture those moments and share them with friends. Similarly, with large sporting events like the FIFA World Cup or other cultural celebrations, these are all moments where activity on the platform naturally spikes.

So the idea would be to take this playbook and explore ways to apply it to those moments as well. That said, nothing has been finalised yet. But it’s definitely something we would look to build on in the future.