‘A big sea of opportunity’: How e-sports will help brands connect with Millenials
At last week’s Mumbrella360 conference, PwC flagged e-sports as a growing opportunity for marketers. Mumbrella’s Paul Wallbank speaks to Scott Wenkart from eSports promoter Showdown to find out how the growing industry can help brands connect with Millennials.
“There’s a big sea there but there’s not a lot of ways to go fishing there,” says Showdown’s Wenkart of the opportunities eSports presents to marketers.
Scott Wenkart founder and managing director of Showdown e-
“The audience is really hungry for it,” he says. “They’re already playing hours and hours so to be able to create something for them to play in then to create something more premium and more professional in the local market has created a massive attention opportunity for us.”
eSports’ audiences are substantial as PwC’s Megan Brownlow described at last week’s Mumbrella360 conference how 43 million spectators watched the recent League of Legends championship final. “The next big thing in sports, it drives advertising and subscriptions, is e-sports,” she said along with predicting the sector will earn US$874 million a year by 2021.
A promising space but non-endemic brands will have to be cautious to not come across as inauthentic, or seen to be jumping on the eSports band-wagon to make a dollar.
Doubt gamers will want to see some irrelevant brand plaster themselves around and provide no value to the audience.