A retrospective on how Games24x7's fantasy platform turned IPL 2025 into a story-led marketing year — from a retooled Anu Malik hook to a JioStar co-presenting slot and an expanded ambassador cohort.
More than a year has passed since IPL 2025 wrapped, but the marketing record Games24x7 set with its fantasy platform My11Circle during that tournament still reads like a case study in how an Indian real-money gaming brand can buy attention without losing the plot. In a post-season interview published on 23 June 2025, Games24x7 Chief Operating Officer Saroj Panigrahi walked Exchange4Media through the campaign, the partnership stack and the product roadmap that the tournament was meant to support. Reading that interview back now, with the IPL 2026 season already in the rear-view, the most useful detail is not the song, the ambassadors or even the JioStar deal. It is the discipline of running all of those layers at once and still shipping product features on the same calendar.
That is the lens this retrospective uses. The verified facts below come from Panigrahi's June 2025 interview and the surrounding Exchange4Media reporting. Where the source allowed, the article pairs the campaign detail with what fantasy players and team-selector behaviour actually sees in-season — captain cycles, contest entry timing, regional reach — so the marketing story sits next to its on-platform impact rather than floating free of it.
My11Circle's flagship IPL 2025 campaign was called Circle Mein Aaja. The hook was a nostalgic reimagining of Anu Malik's 1990s hit Aaja Meri Gaadi Mein Baith Jaa, retitled Aaja Mere Circle Mein Aaja. The choice is deliberate. A retro pop hook is recognisable to a wide adult cricket audience that grew up in cable-TV India, and a single melodic line is easy to repurpose across TVCs, OTT pre-rolls, creator edits and radio spots without losing brand recall. For a category that has spent most of the last decade leaning on celebrity athletes, that kind of audio-led distinctiveness is unusually cheap to repeat across a seven-week tournament.
Panigrahi's framing in the interview was that storytelling, not media weight, was the load-bearing pillar of IPL 2025 for the platform. That is a familiar line in any marketing keynote. What makes it credible here is that the storytelling artefact — a song most Indian viewers of a certain age already know — was cheap to extend, easy to translate into regional markets and hard to confuse with any rival's audio brand. The product story underneath, with AI captain tools and live match analysis, sat inside that hook rather than competing with it.
The IPL 2025 ambassador list was broader than the previous season. Sourav Ganguly, Shubman Gill, Mohammed Siraj, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Rinku Singh and Yashasvi Jaiswal carried over from prior cycles. The new additions were Phil Salt, Marco Jansen, Travis Head, Nicholas Pooran, Trent Boult and T. Natarajan.
That list is not a stack of celebrity faces. It is a roster that maps unusually well to the IPL auction cycles of 2024 and 2025 and to fantasy captain math. Salt and Pooran are wicketkeeper-batters who clear the boundary frequently and accumulate strike-rate bonuses. Head and Gill are top-order anchors who can be captain picks on flat decks. Siraj, Boult, Jansen and Natarajan cover pace and left-arm angles — the kinds of match-ups that swing bowling points in the second half of an innings. For a fantasy platform, this is a selection-side argument as much as a marketing one: the ambassador gallery doubles as a captain-candidate roster that players can find on team sheets the same week they see them in ads.
Ganguly's role is the outlier. He is not a current selection candidate, but he carries category authority with an older fantasy cohort and adds a regional-cable familiarity in the East. That kind of pairing — one durable, multi-decade face plus a bench of in-form players — is what fantasy operators have historically used to bridge an experienced deposit-paying cohort and the younger free-to-paid funnel.
IPL 2025 was My11Circle's second year as an Associate Sponsor of the tournament, on the back of a five-year BCCI Associate Partner deal that runs through the TATA IPL cycle. Sponsorship inventory alone does not decide a fantasy platform's season — most users never consciously register an Associate-Sponsor logo — but it sets the floor for category credibility when buyers compare platforms and gives the brand a defensible seat in official partner lounges and broadcast lower-thirds.
The more specific move in 2025 was the co-presenting partnership with JioStar for the official digital streaming of the IPL. Digital co-presenting inventory is not the same as a TV presenting slot. It buys the brand pre-roll and mid-roll adjacency on the official streaming feed — the place where the heaviest single-session fantasy players actually sit — and it travels with the audience as match windows shift from cable TV to phones. For a platform whose contest entries peak in the first over and during the death overs, that adjacency matters more than reach numbers suggest.
The BCCI relationship also produced the verifiable season-over-season numbers Panigrahi cited. In IPL 2024, My11Circle reported a 50% increase in the number of teams created within the first two weeks of the season, and a 50% rise in mega-prize winners. Those are not invented milestones. They are the kind of KPI a fantasy CFO will defend in front of a board because the unit economics on a multi-mega contest depend on participation volume, not just registered users.
Panigrahi described the IPL 2025 plan as a 360-degree strategy covering OTT platforms, digital media, social channels and on-ground activations. The largest share of the front-loaded budget was directed to digital and OTT, followed by TV and then on-ground. That ordering is consistent with the broader shift in Indian cricket viewership since the 2023 media-rights reset, where JioCinema and Hotstar absorbed the bulk of incremental consumption and TV's relative weight in cricket planning dropped accordingly.
The interesting tactical detail is what was not at the top of the spend stack. Print and out-of-home have largely fallen out of IPL fantasy marketing for all but the largest players. The order Panigrahi described — digital and OTT first, TV second, on-ground third — is closer to the way fantasy operators actually acquire users in-season: paid social to find free-to-play sign-ups, OTT pre-roll to convert during peak match windows, TV for category reinforcement during prime time, and on-ground for the cities that need a physical footprint to keep a regional sales conversation alive.
For fantasy readers, the takeaway is more practical than it sounds. The same ordering explains why contest-volume spikes tend to cluster around the second innings of marquee matches: that is when the heaviest digital and OTT spend is delivering impressions to the heaviest cohort of in-app users, and when a fantasy operator's best marketing dollar can still move a contest entry in the same session.
The interview surfaced five product-level innovations My11Circle highlighted for IPL 2025: AI-powered Team Machine tools, Live Match Analysis, hyper-personalised fan zones, in-app Loot Zone gamified gameplay and Winner Reactions — a social sharing tool for winners. Each of these is a small, specific UX surface rather than a single headline feature, and each one maps to a defined moment in the user journey.
Team Machine sits at team-creation time. Live Match Analysis sits during the second innings. Fan zones sit in the morning between matches. Loot Zone sits in the idle minutes before an over. Winner Reactions sit in the post-match window when a user is most likely to share a screenshot on a chat group. None of these is novel on its own — comparable surfaces exist across the fantasy category — but the calendar alignment is what the interview implicitly argues for: product and campaign release notes on the same seven-week calendar, rather than product launches in one quarter and IPL campaigns in another.
For a fantasy reader, the practical signal is that any platform running a serious IPL 2026 plan will be pacing its in-app feature drops around the same fixture rhythm. Features that ship mid-tournament tend to look like marketing tie-ins; features that ship pre-season and get iterated during the tournament tend to look like product. The My11Circle framing falls into the second category.
Regional outreach for IPL 2025 was led by actors Saurabh Shukla, Abhishek Banerjee and Durgesh Kumar, supported by micro-influencers and regional celebrities. That cast list is worth pausing on. Saurabh Shukla is the face of the central Indian small-town authority figure; Abhishek Banerjee carries the eastern metropolitan weight of Paatal Lok; Durgesh Kumar rose to visibility through Panchayat and is one of the most recognisable Hindi-belt small-town faces of the last few years. None of them is a cricket broadcaster. All of them speak directly to the Tier 2 and Tier 3 fantasy cohort that platforms have been chasing since 2023.
The use of actors rather than broadcasters or ex-cricketers is a regional-language shortcut. A Saurabh Shukla reference lands in Indore, Bhopal and Patna; an Abhishek Banerjee reference travels across the east; a Durgesh Kumar reference travels across the Hindi belt and beyond. Micro-influencers fill the second layer with vernacular creators who can run contest-promo reels in Bhojpuri, Marathi, Bangla and Telugu without sounding like an out-of-town brand read.
Panigrahi tied this directly to the contest funnel: when entry friction drops in the user's first language, contest entries and team-creation lifts follow. That is consistent with what the broader Indian fantasy category has reported since 2022. The My11Circle case does not break the pattern; it sharpens it by allocating named ambassadors to specific regional clusters rather than running a single all-India voice.
The on-ground activation Panigrahi singled out was Circle Salute — an activation that celebrated overlooked IPL workers including groundsmen and security staff. The framing is unusual. Most on-ground activations chase fan selfies at stadium gates. Circle Salute explicitly shifted the lens away from broadcast-visible roles — players, broadcasters, fans in expensive seats — to the people who keep the match running.
That kind of activation does not move a contest-entry chart. It does something the brand team can talk about for the rest of the year. For a category that has spent the last decade defending itself against responsible-gaming scrutiny, an activation that quietly thanks the invisible labour behind the tournament is a reputational deposit. It also pairs naturally with the kind of responsible-play messaging the platform was already running.
Panigrahi used the interview to underline that every My11Circle ad during IPL 2025 carried disclaimers and responsible-play messaging, and that the campaigns adhered to ASCI guidelines. That line matters in a category that has had multiple real-money gaming brands pulled up by ASCI in recent seasons for fantasy-style creative that obscured the skill-based or chance-based nature of the offer. The My11Circle position — disclaimers in every ad, ASCI compliance as a baseline, responsible-play messaging as a default layer — is now the de facto floor for responsible fantasy marketing in India.
Panigrahi also made a sector argument that goes beyond his own platform. He called for a central regulatory framework to distinguish legitimate skill-based gaming from illegal operators. That is a category-protection argument. Skill-based daily fantasy sits in a narrow regulatory lane that varies state by state, and the line between a legal skill-based platform and an illegal betting operator is not always obvious to a first-time user. A central framework, in his telling, would let compliant platforms compete on product and brand rather than on how aggressively their ad creative can dance around the skill-versus-chance line.
For fantasy players, the practical implication is that the platform you pick in any given state still depends on the local eligibility list, and that the responsible-play layer is now an explicit part of the marketing brief, not an afterthought.
The interview closed on a non-cricket note. My11Circle has previously run Pro Kabaddi League campaigns featuring Pawan Sehrawat, and is actively exploring football alongside kabaddi beyond cricket. That is a portfolio decision. Cricket is the anchor tournament for the platform, but kabaddi gives a second high-intensity domestic window in the second half of the year, and football — once the right league-rights picture firms up — opens a third international window.
For a fantasy operator, multi-sport portfolios matter because they reduce dependence on a single calendar. IPL runs April to May. The T20 World Cup and bilateral cricket fill gaps. Kabaddi and football extend the contest-year into months when there is no major cricket series. The economics of running a fantasy operation depend on keeping entry funnels warm across the year, not on monetising only the IPL.
This is also where the brand investment from Circle Mein Aaja starts to amortise. A melodic hook that travels well across sport verticals is more useful to a multi-sport operator than to a cricket-only platform. The decision to invest in audio-led distinctiveness rather than celebrity-driven memorability reads differently once kabaddi and football enter the picture.
For readers building IPL 2026 squads on any fantasy platform — not just My11Circle — the verified record from IPL 2025 is useful as a category benchmark rather than a recommendation. Five patterns stand out. First, the ambassador roster a platform runs tends to mirror its in-app captain-advice tilt: platforms that lean on top-order anchors tend to push anchor-captain picks, platforms that add power-hitters tend to push risk-on captain calls. Second, the BCCI Associate-Sponsor layer signals category credibility but does not predict product quality. Third, the digital-and-OTT-first media ordering means peak contest-entry moments track second-innings OTT reach more closely than they track TV prime time. Fourth, regional-language entry friction still drives team-creation in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cohorts, even on platforms that do not run a Saurabh Shukla-tier actor campaign. Fifth, the responsible-play layer is now a default feature of category marketing, not a defensive add-on.
Readers who follow fantasy cricket strategy across platforms can use those patterns to time contest entries, pick captain cycles and read brand campaigns without mistaking any of them for captain-pick advice. The marketing stack tells you how a platform is trying to acquire and retain you in a given window. The product roadmap tells you whether the team-creation experience has actually changed since the last window. The two are not the same thing.
The verified IPL 2025 record from Games24x7 and My11Circle, as published by Exchange4Media on 23 June 2025, sets out a clear marketing year: a single audio-led flagship campaign in Circle Mein Aaja, a wider ambassador cohort that doubled as a captain-candidate roster, a second-year BCCI Associate-Sponsor extension, a co-presenting partnership with JioStar for digital streaming, a digital-and-OTT-led media spend, a small stack of in-app product features released on the tournament calendar, regional outreach anchored by named Hindi-belt actors and micro-influencers, an on-ground activation in Circle Salute that honoured invisible tournament labour, ASCI-compliant creative with responsible-play messaging as a default, and a sector-level call for a central regulatory framework.
Read together, those moves describe a fantasy platform trying to occupy category-defining territory without burning credibility on either responsible-play or product gaps. Whether the same playbook travels into IPL 2026 — and whether it scales into kabaddi and football — is the next thing to watch. The verified record for IPL 2025 is now closed. The next round of brand filings, BCCI partnership renewals and ambassador announcements will tell us how much of this year carries over.
Pair brand-side moves with the in-app product releases that change your team-creation flow.