Esports is a Tricky Business — How Brands Should Jump on the Esports Bandwagon

A few years ago E-sports exploded onto the marketing scene, presenting a whole new opportunity for brands, one that has enormous potential, but is incredibly risky. Over the last year alone brands’ investments have grown 50%, one of two industry trends Rodrigo Samwell of ESL cited in a panel moderated by Fast Company’s Jeff Beer with Samwell, Caroline Pilz (Daimler AG) and Alex Clegg (CEO, Super Union). The other is that many of these brands are non-endemic.

All three panelists emphasized the enormous potential for brands to benefit, while inisisting on the need for authenticity. “it’s important to pull back and not just consider the segment or channel but that this is a dynamic rich world, full of culture and creativity”, explained Clegg. Brands need to tell stories that make sense and engage in order to be appreciated and the way to go about this is to create be an insider.

Those brands that have succeeded so far have found ways to reference games and players themselves, like a recent Snickers campaign which inserted its “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign into the world by partnering with some of the world’s top players in a clever operation. As the players grew more hungry they started making increasingly careless mistakes, driving a conversation on Twitch, where audiences were asking questions about the unusual behavior. The reveal came when players turned their performance around after eating a Snickers.