In what can be considered as a marketing and publicity coup, leading sports fantasy company Dream11 has announced its collaboration with international social media sensation Khaby Lame, marking the first-ever association of the latter with an Indian brand.
Khaby created a short video skit with Indian content-creator, Viraj Ghelani, and in his trademark style called upon people to accomplish day-to-day tasks in a straightforward manner and use their brains to play on Dream11.
In the video, Ghelani is sitting with a friend who is eating french fries with toothpicks. Ghelani isn’t amused and calls Lame to simplify this. Lame picks up a fry with his fingers and eats it, showing viewers how simple this is in his signature style, extending his arms with inimitable facial expressions.
Wearing a Dream11 jersey, Lame then points to a placard that says ‘Dimaag Lagana Hai Toh Dream11 Pe Laga Na’ reiterating the brand’s message to put their intellectual might for picking a team on Dream11.
Dream11 has been one of the top IPL sponsors since 2019, and for the 2021 edition, launched multi-media campaigns under #Dream11PeDimaagLagaNa and #TeamHaiTohMazaaHai. Recently, Dream11 became the first-ever Indian brand to be featured in the Top-10 list of SportsPro World’s 50 Most Marketable Brands (50MM).
Earlier this month, the company reported a record profit of Rs 181 crore for the financial year 2019-20 up from a loss of Rs 87.8 crore in the previous year, according to its regulatory filings.
The revenue shot up to Rs 2070 crore up from Rs 775.5 crore in the previous year i.e., 2.67x growth YoY. It is noteworthy that Dream11 had a negative operating cash flow of Rs 57.4 crore during FY18-19 which turned into positive cash inflows of nearly Rs 261 crore during FY19-20.
The Mumbai-based company had spent amounts aggressively towards advertising. It is noteworthy that Dream11 was the sponsor of the IPL 2020 edition (the sponsorship expenses will be accounted for in FY20-21). The fantasy platform relies heavily on advertising across media platforms to attract downloads on its app solely through APKs or Android Application Package. The app is not available on the Playstore.
Advertising and promotional expenses made up for 71.1% of the annual expenses with a YoY increase by 69.20% to Rs 1328.02 crore during FY20 from Rs 785.1 crore in FY19. Sponsorship costs reportedly went down by 39% to Rs 100.7 crore during FY19-20.
Harsh Jain – co-founder and CEO Dream11 – has been in the news for setting up an investment fund to back early and mid-stage startups.
Jain and his family are likely to invest 100 million dollars in setting up the fund. The total investment could shoot as high as 200 million dollars, which would make the fund potentially the largest to be set up by a new economy entrepreneur. The corpus, which will also include capital from outside investors, is still being decided.
Dream11 is also preparing to close a new round of funding at a valuation of 8 billion dollars in the coming weeks which is expected to be primarily a secondary sale of shares. Dream11 was valued at 2.5 billion in September last year.