Last week, when the first match of the Men’s Cricket World Cup kicked off at The Oval grounds in London, media planners and marketers heaved a partial sigh of relief. Finally, they could rest for a while after the madness of a season packed with mega events. The recently concluded Indian Premier League tournament and the Lok Sabha elections preceded the 12th edition of the ICC World Cup. Between cricket and politics, the first-half of 2019 became a never-ending series of opportunities and challenges for marketers. Idi Srinivas Murthy, entrepreneur and former marketer at Snapdeal, GSK and Coca Cola thinks that at a macro level, the current fragmentation of audience interests and media choices is increasing the value of big impact platforms like IPL, World Cup and General Elections. “For non-seasonal sectors like gaming, consumer-tech (Uber/Swiggy, etc), fintech (Paytm and the like), travel and leisure, these multiple big-ticket events in sequence is really good. And the traditionally ‘seasonal’ operators are also aggressively building out portfolios across the year. For example, Coca Cola was a big part of the IPL and is also part of Cricket World Cup this time,” he adds.The big game drawThe fact that the tournament is taking…