Why marketers are slow to embrace the eSports industry
One month ago, on the evening of 28th of July, a 16-year-old Kyle Giersdorf took home $3 million (£2.4M) by becoming the first Fortnite World Cup champion. It was no easy task for the teenager (in-game nickname Bugha) as the competition attracted more than 40 million players attempting to qualify for it and 99 others making the shortlist for the live tournament in New York.
The World Cup was a major success for the organisers by bringing over 2.3 million concurrent viewers across YouTube and Twitch (an Amazon-owned video game-play streaming service), making it the most-watched competitive gaming event so far. In the backstage of all this, there were also brands trying to cash in from the success. However, despite the huge reach, low cost and highly engaged audience, it was evident that companies are still reluctant to market within the eSports industry.
American food delivery company GrubHub sponsored two teams – Team Liquid and TSM – during the Fortnite World Cup and used the gaming environment to get new users for their app. Instead of being a one-off experiment for the company, the event forms a wider eSports marketing strategy for the company. Speaking to AdAge Jessica Burns, GrubHub’s VP of brand marketing, noted the opportunities they have in the industry “They are sequestered, in a way, with their skills – (food) delivery is part of their lives. When you look at a game like Fortnite, they have so many players and the impression levels are through the roof.” It seems like a natural fit for GrubHub to market in the industry.
If we look at some of the bigger brands, last year Gillette showed that they recognise the growing influence of the gaming community by partnering with one of the most popular Twitch streamers Guy Beahm (Twitch name Dr DisRepect). It is worth noting that Guy used Gillette assets as part of his online identity for a number of years through his theme songs and slogans, but it was only recently that the pair formed an official partnership. It almost seemed as if the idea had difficulties gaining internal approval…
Unfortunately, examples like GrubHub or Gillette, are not that common. Tuning into a channel on Twitch you will be greeted with advertisements for video games, computer hardware or gaming chairs. Regular FMCG brands – those that contribute to an awful lot of world’s digital ad spend – are rarely seen. Why are marketers so slow or reluctant to recognise the potential?
You might say the reach of these platforms is not big enough and that it is not sufficient to attract the big-buck advertisers. Yet, last year Twitch’s concurrent viewership was higher than that of highest-rated US cable channels – CNN or MSNBC. This year the number is slowly approaching the 1 million average viewer count, and has earned a mention in the widely anticipated Mary Meekers Internet Trends Report for a trend to lookout for. Twitch is just one platform – add YouTube Gaming, Mixer, any Chinese streaming service (Twitch is banned in China) and you get the picture. According to Newzoo statistics there are at least 380 million eSports viewers worldwide. If you consider gaming as a whole, the number swells up to 2.5 billion people. For the world of marketing, that is obsessed with millennials, how can we not see the channel as an opportunity?
In my opinion, the big hurdle in getting brands to consider eSports and gaming as their marketing channels is the old stereotype of the industry. The view that most gamers are teens sat in their bedrooms hooked to their consoles with little purchasing power is an old one and incredibly outdated. Looking at the gaming industry as whole, surveys with samples from the UK, US, Germany and France put the gender split of gamers at 50/50 and their age at mid-30s. If we look at individual games, we can find examples where the audience has a larger female audience than male or find games that attract mainly 30+ audience. How can we stereotype an industry of millions of people into one very narrow definition?
This brings me to the second point, which is widely related to the first – there is a lack of knowledge about the gaming industry. Most marketers have little knowledge about the industry and thus might opt to go for something familiar rather than explore something new. I have to partly agree with their approach as jumping into the ship without much research could lead to disastrous results. At the same time, when does an opportunity become too big to miss? One of the biggest risks (and opportunities) when going into this industry is that each game tends to attract a different kind of audience, thus research beforehand is crucial. The same way audiences of football, rugby and tennis are not identical, likewise those of Fortnite, Starcraft and Candy Crush are different.
If I stay in my role of playing devil’s advocate, I will admit that the audience is also notoriously known for being averse to regular advertising and requires a bit of creativity to engage it. Speaking at Advertising Week Europe last year, Yvonne Hobden, consumer marketing lead at HP UK, summed it up that the gaming “[…] audience is so quick to judge. You get it wrong and that’s it – it’s game over. You’ve got to take your time to understand it, don’t rush it.”
But taking the time to understand the audience and engage it can reap huge benefits. Gamers understand the benefits of brands coming into eSports and reward companies that do it right. There are plenty of examples of brands doing it right. Washington Post got politicians to play video games with them live while being interviewed. Snickers put it’s “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign to live display by having video game streamers perform worse as they got hungrier only to be saved by a Snickers bar. Red Bull opened the UK’s largest public eSports studio giving an environment to nurture aspiring gamers. These are the brands looking for ways to engage the audience instead of pushing ads in front of their faces.
Luke Cotton, director of consultancy Code Red Esports, on a separate interview to Marketing Week, had the perfect analogy “If you sponsor Manchester United you might get exposure, but nobody loves Chevrolet because they sponsor Man United. That’s different with eSports. The fans appreciate that brands enable them to get a load of really high quality free content…”
Last hurdle that is keeping marketers from this industry is gaining internal buy-in. Translating the data of gamers to the top executives is a tough task and one that requires time for perceptions to change. Last year Ford did something that no previous automaker has done. They launched their new car at a gaming event. While Ford and racing might seem like a natural fit, speaking to Marketing Week Ford Europe’s executive director of communications and public affairs Michael Baumann admits that it was no easy task to convince the idea internally “At first people have this impression that gamers are teenagers and therefore not relevant to our target audience. But when you look at the data, you’ll find gamers are much older than you think. When we started to present more of the data […] we could convince people internally a bit better.”
One of the ways to achieve that buy-in is to showcase the opportunities that are non-existent elsewhere. If you take Twitch as an example, the platform gives you a chance to see live reactions to the advertisements being played or communicated via influencers. It is a source of organic feedback at a time when other data sources are under increased scrutiny for their validity. Combine that data with analytical tools and you will have a unique source of feedback from the community that will save you thousands of pounds in market research. The highly segmented audience of different games also gives an opportunity to reach a targeted audience without micro-profiling people through Facebook or Google that gets such a bad reputation for advertisers these days.
There are plenty of opportunities for marketers willing to experiment in these channels, despite the lack of investment within the industry so far. The key is doing your research beforehand and understanding the segments within the industry… As with every marketing channel.