India’s schedule includes a West Indies series, a tour of New Zealand across October and November, Sri Lanka’s visit in December and a five-Test home series against Australia beginning in January 2027. The women’s team is also scheduled to host Zimbabwe for six international matches in October.
The fixtures offer advertising opportunities during the festive and year-end spending period. But the absence of current Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) television ratings is complicating negotiations, according to a report by Exchange4media’s Imran Fazal.
The issue extends beyond the immediate question of what advertisers will pay. Changes to the way television audiences are measured could also affect how broadcasters compare future cricket series with previous editions.
A changing measurement system complicates future valuations
Broadcasters have historically been able to use audience data from earlier cricket series when discussing the likely value of upcoming matches. That approach could become less straightforward once ratings resume under revised measurement arrangements.
The Sales Strategist Founder and Connected-TV Expert Vishal V. Khanna noted: “When BARC returns, it returns with a new rupee. The 2026 policy excludes landing-page viewership, and BARC has indicated CTV will enter published ratings. The old series and the new series won’t be like-for-like. You’ll be pricing tomorrow’s inventory with yesterday’s notes. So yes, price discovery is fundamentally weakened.”
The Border-Gavaskar Trophy illustrates the difficulty of comparing events separated by several years. Australia’s previous Test tour of India took place in early 2023, while the next home series is scheduled to begin in January 2027.
The challenge is not simply the absence of a recent rating. Broadcasters and agencies may also need to account for differences between the audience figures produced before and after the measurement changes.
Khanna offered an analogy for the uncertainty in advertising negotiations: “Selling cricket without BARC is like selling gold without a hallmark. Nobody doubts it’s gold. Everybody negotiates as if it’s 18-carat.”
Advertising packages could change as broadcasters manage uncertainty
One possible response is to alter the structure of cricket advertising agreements rather than rely exclusively on rates attached to individual matches or series.
Media Care Brand Solutions Director Yasin Hamidani said: “A prolonged blackout could put greater pressure on bilateral properties than marquee tournaments. We could see more negotiated pricing, bundled series packages, added inventory, cross-platform deals and performance guarantees as broadcasters try to reduce advertiser risk.”
Such arrangements would give broadcasters different ways to construct deals across their available inventory. They could also offer advertisers alternatives to committing their budgets against the expected television audience of a single series.
However, the appeal of any package would still depend on the matches and platforms included, as well as the commercial objectives of the brands involved.
Not all advertisers are changing their buying strategies
The ratings blackout has introduced caution into some advertising decisions, but its effect on spending commitments is not uniform.
Dentsu President of Sports, Gaming, Entertainment and Influencer Marketing Rohit Potphode stated: “The measurement uncertainty has understandably made some advertisers more cautious about committing their entire budgets upfront, particularly for lower-profile series and non-prime-time fixtures. However, it would be premature to conclude that the market has universally shifted towards last-minute buying or shorter commitments.”
Advertisers with established annual sports sponsorship arrangements may continue making longer-term investments. Brands running tactical or performance-focused campaigns, meanwhile, may prefer to commit funds in stages or retain greater flexibility.
This distinction means that the ratings blackout is not necessarily producing a single negotiating pattern across the market.
Historical audience data remains useful, but has limitations
In the absence of current weekly ratings, advertisers and media agencies are drawing on existing knowledge of cricket audiences and other indicators when evaluating potential investments.
Sony Pictures Networks India Head of Linear Ad Sales Akshay Agrawal explained: “Historical viewership data continues to be an important reference point for advertisers and media agencies when evaluating cricket investments. There is a fairly established understanding of how different cricket properties perform, particularly when India is playing. Beyond that, advertisers are also looking at indicators such as search uplift to assess the impact of their association with a property. These inputs help brands make informed investment decisions even in the absence of weekly ratings.”
Those reference points can inform negotiations, although they cannot establish the actual television audience delivered by a particular match during the blackout.
Hamidani addressed the difficulty of assessing advertising value without a common measurement benchmark: “Cricket will continue attracting advertisers, but without a common measurement currency, it becomes harder to demonstrate whether a particular series justified its premium. Broadcasters can sell on historical performance, team strength and expected interest, but advertisers are naturally more cautious when the eventual audience delivery cannot be independently benchmarked in the usual manner.”
Bilateral cricket faces a different commercial test from IPL and ICC events
The broader concern is how the lack of independent audience measurement affects different categories of cricket.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) and ICC tournaments have established commercial appeal, while bilateral series can vary considerably in advertiser demand depending on the teams involved and when matches are played.
ITW Universe Co-Founder and Managing Director Bhairav Shanth said: “Bilaterals are harder to monetise than IPL or ICC right now. Those properties carry their own scarcity. The rating was confirmation, not the reason. For standard bilateral inventory, the traditional cricket premium is tougher to hold without an independent currency. India weekends are still clear. Non-India matches and weekday windows are where the resistance sits.”
For broadcasters, the immediate commercial task is therefore not simply to sell more cricket. It is to establish prices and agreement structures that reflect the different appeal of their fixtures while independent television ratings remain unavailable.
The upcoming international calendar will test how successfully broadcasters can achieve that balance—and how much advertisers are prepared to commit without the measurement data that previously underpinned their negotiations.
