In November 2024, one of India's biggest FMCG companies, Hindustan Unilever, started getting a barrage of complaints from its consumers, who said they were seeing the same Dove and Surf Excel ads repeatedly on OTT platforms during a single watch session. Some of them were shown the same ads as many as 150 times within a week.

With IPL around the corner, HUL — which spends nearly Rs 4,000 crore on ads annually — couldn't afford to ignore these complaints. So what followed was a series of investigations. And what they discovered has opened a real can of worms for not just JioHotstar, the platform streaming the IPL, but OTT platforms in general. The big issue is a serious mismatch between what was promised and what's actually being delivered for ad campaigns, according to seven insiders from HUL, Disney, and other industry rivals who spoke to The Ken.

So what happens when a big spender starts feeling like it's not getting what it signed up for during the biggest streaming event of the year? The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan speaks to Daybreak hosts Snigdha and Rahel.

This episode was first published in February 2025. We're re-airing it now because IPL 2026 is live, and the underlying issue the episode raises has not been publicly confirmed as resolved.

Here's what has changed after we first published: ahead of IPL 2025, JioHotstar partnered with Nielsen to introduce third-party verified ad measurement for the first time in Indian OTT. It was a direct response to the advertiser pressure this episode describes. But the Nielsen study that followed measured cross-screen duplication: whether the same viewer was being counted differently across TV, mobile, and connected TV. It didn't address the specific complaint HUL raised, which was about a single user being shown the same ad repeatedly within one platform. JioStar has not publicly confirmed that the problem has been fixed.

What has changed though, for IPL 2026: connected TV ad rates are up 25%, with the base cost of a 10-second ad rising from ₹480 to ₹600 CPM. The money is bigger. And the question of whether advertisers are getting what they pay for remains the same.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.