Understanding the Complexities of Esports Marketing
The esports industry is developing quickly, with new tournaments, new investors, new teams and new ways of consuming content all contributing to the fast changing esports culture. Over the past few years, there have been over 600 esports sponsorship agreements. Over half have been gaming and technology related, but non-endemic sponsorship such as automotive, food/beverage, personal care, and finance/insurance are making up an increasing proportion of brands in the space.
For many sectors, access to a market of young, tech-savvy high earners is a marketers dream. With a projected audience of 600m by 2020, the highly-engaged esports audience is attracting a lot of attention from mainstream brands. However, the esports marketplace is just as unique as long-established traditional sports and is hard to crack. It is absolutely necessary to understand, not only the demographics, but the relationship between audience and products in the esports industry.
Different games attract unique audiences based on subject matter, genre, publisher, tone and so on. Across a Nielsen study of US, UK, France and Germany esports fans, they follow 2 to 3 different genres and around 5 different games. Looking at gender, for example, we find that Counterstrike has a 90:10 male:female split compared with a 71:29 average across all esports. Different games also attract a variety of gaming habits — across the 4 countries in the report, Overwatch fans play the most, an average of 12.2 hours a week, Fifa fans play the least, just 5.3 hours.
“Brands entering the esports space, in whatever capacity, need to have done their due diligence and homework, to understand not only their own objectives but also the audience, their habits and their preferences,” says Nicole Pike, Nielsen Esports’ Global Research and Product Lead.
“Understanding the complexities and intricacies of the esports marketplace is another major challenge — there are a multitude of teams, tournaments, titles, players and commercial and broadcast models in play, as the sector develops and matures. We are already seeing examples of brands making the most of the opportunity and generating significant returns on their investments in esports.”
By creating a decentralized platform for direct interaction between brands, esports providers and the audience, Esports Interactive Platform (EIP) aim to simplify esports marketing. With the use of smart contracts, the EIPlatform will allow brands to more effectively understand and target their desired audience. They will then be able to measure the effectiveness of their investments and identify new opportunities within the esports space.
To read more about Esports Interactive Platform, please visit the Official Website
You can read the EIP whitepaper here
