About the Brand

The Brief

Not an Awareness Brief. A Cultural Moment Brief.

The brief arrived with a single directional clarity: use cricket, India’s most-watched cultural event, to make Bakingo the brand that belongs at every celebration. Not just in awareness metrics, but in the mental model of a consumer who is already thinking about celebration.

The campaign was built around four objectives that defined the scope:

• Increase aided brand awareness in metro markets, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, and Bangalore.
• Drive online ad awareness among cricket-viewing audiences on JioStar’s CTV and handheld inventory.
• Strengthen message association for “Never Stop Wishing”, Bakingo’s core brand positioning.
• Boost purchase intent in the Cakes & Desserts category among the 18–45+ target demographic.

The Challenge

Build Visibility at Scale Without Losing the Message in the Noise.

Cricket at the scale of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 offers reach that few other media contexts can match. 450 million viewers across CTV and handheld devices is an extraordinary inventory opportunity. But that scale introduces a specific challenge that most FMCG campaigns fail to solve.

Three structural challenges defined the campaign problem:

• Reach Without Recall: At tournament-level scale, the volume of advertisers competing for attention is as large as the audience itself. Building genuine brand visibility, not just impression delivery, required a creative strategy that made Bakingo immediately recognisable and emotionally resonant within the first five seconds of every placement.
• Frequency Without Fatigue: Maximising reach while maintaining optimal frequency is one of the most precise balancing acts in media planning. Too few exposures and brand recall doesn’t form. Too many and the audience disengages. The campaign had to hold the line across both dimensions simultaneously across three geographies.
• Frequency Without Fatigue: Message Coherence Across Formats: JioStar’s inventory spans Connected TV screens and handheld devices, two fundamentally different viewing contexts. A campaign that felt natural in both required creative work that didn’t just resize but genuinely fit each context without losing the brand message that the brief demanded.

The Approach

The Creative Didn’t Start With the Ad. It Started With the Moment.

Before a single frame was finalised, the campaign strategy mapped the emotional territory Bakingo needed to own and how JioStar’s platform architecture could reach the right audience at the right frequency with the right creative. Three workstreams ran simultaneously.

01. Campaign Design: The Right Platform. The Right Moment. The Right Inventory.

The campaign ran on JioStar across CTV and Handheld inventory during the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 (22 Feb – 8 Mar 2026). Two 20-second Hindi/English video creatives were deployed across Reels, MidRolls, and PPL placements, the formats that deliver highest attention and completion rates within the JioStar ecosystem.

Geo-targeting focused on Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, Bakingo’s primary metro markets and the cities most likely to convert campaign awareness into direct purchase. The audience was defined as 18–45+ with a Male > Female skew, reflecting the cricket-viewing demographic most likely to be occasion-driven Bakingo purchasers.

02. Creative Strategy: Human Moments. A Brand That Belongs in Them.

The creative approach was built around one governing principle: Bakingo should feel like a natural participant in life’s celebratory moments, not an intruder between cricket overs.

• Brand logo present on all frames, simple, clear, and direct messaging throughout. No ambiguity about who was speaking.
• Brand visually introduced within the first 5 seconds, building immediate brand recall before a viewer could look away.
• Human-centric storytelling with a clear role for Bakingo in celebratory and life moments. The brand wasn’t the hero; the moment was.
• Ad 1: Hospital birthday surprise, emotional and relatable. A moment most Indian families have lived.
• Ad 2: Outdoor fitness setting, aspirational. Celebrating achievement, not just occasions.

The dual creative approach allowed the campaign to reach two different emotional registers of the same consumer: the person who celebrates family and the person who celebrates self. Both reach Bakingo.

03. Research Methodology: Measuring What Moved.

The brand lift study was designed to isolate the campaign’s direct contribution to brand health metrics, separating what the advertising moved from the baseline.

• Control vs Exposed survey design: 1,155 control respondents (not seen ad) vs 1,215 exposed respondents (seen ad on JioStar).
• Matched audience profiles across four brand health metrics: Aided Awareness, Online Ad Awareness, Message Association, and Purchase Intent.
• Relative uplift between the two groups was used to determine campaign-driven brand impact, removing organic brand growth from the measurement.

The methodology ensured that every metric reported reflects the campaign’s specific contribution, not ambient brand performance. At a 90% confidence level.

Creative Platform

Never Stop Wishing. A Message Built for Cricket’s Emotional Register.

“Never Stop Wishing” isn’t a tagline. It’s a brand philosophy that earns its place in Indian culture by tapping directly into the aspirational energy that cricket generates.

Cricket in India is a vehicle for collective wishing, for the team, for the win, for the moment when the right result arrives. Bakingo’s creative positioned the brand as the natural conclusion of that wish: a product that belongs when the wishing is done and the celebrating begins.

That alignment between platform (cricket), emotion (aspiration), and product (celebration cake) created a message coherence that most FMCG campaigns working in sports contexts fail to build. The creative didn’t borrow cricket’s emotional energy. It extended it into the purchase context Bakingo needed to own.

Key Achievements

Four Brand Health Metrics. Every One Moved.

The campaign moved all four brand health metrics Bakingo set out to shift: Aided Brand Awareness, Online Ad Awareness, Message Association, and Purchase Intent. Every one of them went in the right direction.

Beyond the lead metrics, three more signals confirmed the campaign had earned its audience, not just reached it.

• Never Stop Wishing landed. Message Association rose 44% among the exposed audience, a measurable shift in how the brand registered in the minds of people who saw the campaign.
• The creative travelled beyond paid inventory. Positive social sentiment surged 7x during the campaign period, earned through resonance, not reach.
• Awareness converted into action. Search interest rose 1.3x, app downloads 1.4x, and website visits 1.8x across the campaign window.

The Results

What the Campaign Moved Across Every Metric That Matters.

• 100% Higher
  Online Ad Awareness
• 125% Stronger
  Purchase Intent
• 50% Higher
  Aided Brand Awareness

• 44% Stronger
  Message Association
• 7x Positive
  Social Mentions
• 1.8x Accelerated
  Website Visits

What the Campaign Made Possible

A Cake Brand That Now Lives in Cricket’s Emotional Vocabulary.

The numbers are one story. The mental model shift is the one that compounds.

Purchase intent uplift of 125% means that among the audience who saw the campaign, more than twice as many were willing to consider Bakingo for their next purchase compared to those who hadn’t seen it. That is not an awareness metric. That is a conversion metric with a longer conversion window.

Message association at 44% uplift means “Never Stop Wishing” found its audience, that the creative strategy’s goal of tying Bakingo to India’s celebratory emotional register was accomplished at a measurable level in a 14-day campaign window.

Social sentiment at 7× means the campaign exceeded its paid media boundaries. The creative work resonated enough that audiences carried it beyond the JioStar inventory into organic conversation.

And website visits at 1.8× means the brand awareness the campaign built was turning into active interest, people searching for Bakingo, downloading the app, and arriving on the website after the ad made them curious enough to look.

The Takeaway

The Moment Was Always There. The Campaign Built the Bridge.

Bakingo’s challenge was never relevance. In India’s metro markets, the brand had built genuine recognition in the Cakes & Desserts category. What the ICC T20 World Cup campaign addressed was the gap between existing brand familiarity and the active consideration state that drives purchase.

Cricket created the context. JioStar provided the inventory. The creative gave Bakingo a role in India’s biggest shared emotional experience. And the research methodology made sure every metric that moved was tracked with enough rigour to separate the campaign’s contribution from the noise.

When reach was right, recall formed. When recall formed, message association followed. When message association held, purchase intent lifted. Each metric built on the one before it because they were all serving the same objective: make Bakingo the brand that Indians reach for when the moment is worth celebrating.