Mobile Premier League (MPL), one of the largest e-sports and mobile gaming platform in India, has roped in YouTube influencer Amit Bhadana as its brand ambassador.
Announcing the development in a statement, the company said that "MPL is focusing on YouTube to increase its brand awareness as it recently crossed 1.2 million subscribers on its channel."Bhadana happens to be one of India's biggest Youtube stars with close to 22 million followers, and has also been associated with MPL for a while, having featured the company in many of his sketches on the video-sharing platform.
Alongside Bhadana, MPL has also brought other YouTubers such as Ashish Chanchlani and Elvish Yadav on board to launch marketing initiatives. Previously, MPL had collaborated with Virat Kohli and actor Tamannaah Bhatia, and is now on the lookout for young digital influencers to boost presence and increase consumer base.
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"YouTube is a big focus area for our branding initiatives. A large part of our target group is active on YouTube, we have seen good traction on our app via the channel," said Abhishek Madhavan, senior VP, growth and marketing at MPL.
As per the data revealed by Sensor Tower - an application intelligence firm - India tops the list for the biggest global markets for mobile game downloads in the first nine months of 2020, with Indians having downloaded 7.3 billion games. This figure accounts for almost 17% of all global downloads.
Earlier this month, advertisement industry body Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) issued new guidelines pertaining to India's gaming industry. The new law states that gaming ads cannot depict people under the age of 18 to be playing online games for monetary rewards. For games of this sort, ASCI mandates there should be disclaimers, cautioning the gamers about elements of financial risks, and the general addictive nature of the games; ads that use the combination of audio-visual, will have to align the disclaimers to both - voice and text.
The guidelines, taking effect from December 15, also add that the ads cannot show games with monetary rewards to be an employment opportunity and act as a substitute to occupations.
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