Sponsors tilt toward wellness
IPL advertising is shifting toward health, pharma and wellness brands, which demand different on-ground activations and compliance than impulse-product sponsors. Mint reports this category move, and teams are altering activation plans and signage, meaning operations staff must manage stricter messaging and athlete-access windows for these partners. (livemint.com)
The Indian Premier League is still a machine for selling sugar, snacks, and telecom plans. But the mix is changing in a way that is easy to miss if you only watch the boundary ropes. Health, pharma, and wellness brands are taking more of the space around the tournament, and that is forcing teams to rethink how sponsorship works on the ground, not just how it looks on TV (livemint.com). That shift matters because IPL sponsorship has long rewarded simpler categories. A soft drink wants logos. A delivery app wants a promo code. A pan masala surrogate wants visibility, even when regulators are glaring at it. In IPL 2023, tobacco-product makers took 16% of ad volume during the tournament, up from 7% a year earlier, according to TAM Sports data reported by Mint. Pan masala brands became some of the biggest advertisers in the league’s telecast (livemint.com). The health ministry later moved to push BCCI to stop showing smokeless-tobacco surrogate ads during cricket matches, after research found 41.3% of all smokeless-tobacco surrogate ads in 2023 appeared during the final 17 matches of the Cricket World Cup (livemint.com). Once that kind of sponsor comes under pressure, someone else fills the gap. In the IPL’s current cycle, that “someone else” increasingly includes hospitals, nutrition brands, and wellness companies. Punjab Kings, for example, added Max Healthcare as an official healthcare partner for the 2026 season, alongside Amul Protein, a brand built around performance nutrition rather than pure indulgence (sportsmintmedia.com). Social Samosa’s roundup of early IPL 2026 campaigns also showed how many brands now want to attach themselves to fitness, everyday health, or “better-for-you” consumption instead of old impulse categories (socialsamosa.com). That sounds like a clean upgrade until you look at the rulebook. Health and wellness advertising in India is now wrapped in layers of compliance. In August 2023, the central government issued additional guidelines for celebrities and influencers endorsing health and wellness products, aimed at curbing misleading claims and forcing more transparency (pib.gov.in). ASCI then updated its influencer guidelines in April 2025 so that people making technical claims in health and nutrition advertising must have relevant qualifications, while general promotional content is treated differently (ascionline.in). In March 2026, India’s drug regulator went further and told pharma companies to stop direct or indirect promotion of prescription weight-loss drugs to the general public, including through social media and influencer campaigns (livemint.com). So when a wellness or pharma brand enters the IPL, it does not just buy a patch on a jersey. It brings lawyers, medical disclaimers, internal review teams, and tighter limits on what players can say or do in sponsor-facing moments. That is why Mint’s report about teams changing activation plans is more than sponsorship trivia. It describes a league whose commercial engine is getting more valuable and more constrained at the same time. IPL 2025 reached 1.19 billion viewers across TV and digital, and 2026 ad revenue is projected in the ₹4,900 crore to ₹5,200 crore range, so every square foot of signage and every minute of player access is now worth even more (mediabrief.com, financialexpress.com). The result is a stranger IPL economy than the old one: fewer easy slogans, more compliance checks, and operations staff figuring out exactly when a cricketer can stand beside a healthcare logo without saying the wrong thing.
