What the ICC Cricket World Cup Tells Marketers About the Internet Today in Asia and the West

The world has changed since the last Cricket World Cup in 2011. In this article we examine how fans based in the two major Asia-Pacific cricketing powers, Australia and India, are using the internet in 2015 to pursue their love of the game and how marketers should respond to the trends.

Cricket is not a game that can be rushed. Matches take hours, sometimes days, and the Cricket World Cup is a two-month extravaganza. From a marketer’s point of view, this is great—the World Cup can be seen as a two-month experiment in sports fan behavior.

The world has changed since the last Cricket World Cup. In 2011, you could be forgiven for predicting that the future of the web was going to look, well, Australian: dominated by the desktop computer, full of English-language content. Four years on, that prediction looks far from the mark. It’s more obvious than ever that marketers need to look to India not just for what the next billion people will be doing but also for where countries like Australia are headed next. When Google first started tracking search trends, baseball was bigger than cricket. Every year since then, cricket has become bigger and bigger.

Cricket fans turn to mobile across the world, but fans in Asia do it more.

Look at these two matches. First, the Australia-England game on Valentine’s Day:;

What are World Cup fans searching for?

World Cup search behavior gives a fascinating insight into fan behavior. Fans are searching for everything from pizza to player’s hairstyles:

• Virat Kohli's hair is setting new trends. Since the World Cup began, searches for his hairstyle have spiked by 15X.
• Searches for fireworks are exploding in India. After a series of popular ads, searches for fireworks have been at their highest in India since New Year's Eve.
• Even cricket-related songs have seen a spike in popularity. After Daryl Braithwaite performed at the opening ceremony, "Howzat" peaked 15X higher than normal.
• Hungry Aussie cricket fans want pizza to go with their gam