Machinima looks to educate marketers claiming eSports set to top $1.3bn globally by 2019
American gaming and media streaming website Machinima is focused on educating marketers about the rapid growth the eSports space, which will become a billion-dollar industry in the next few years.
American gaming and media streaming website Machinima is focused on educating marketers about the rapid growth the eSports space, which will become a billion-dollar industry in the next few years.
Halo4 is one of Machinima’s eSport properties.
Speaking to Mumbrella on the sidelines of its 2016 Newfronts presentation, Don Reiley, head of brand partnerships at Machinima, said the issue was not awareness but getting advertisers to understand how the worldwide market for eSports is expected to go from US$910m in 2016 to US$1.3bn by 2019.
“I think there is a lot of awareness of it – it is in the press a lot – but the space itself is a little confusing,” said Reiley. “There are a lot of leagues, players, tournaments and our goal is to round the edges on that and give direction on how it’s evolving.”
Machinima noted that over 188m people are expected to watch competitive gaming this year globally, with that number tipped to reach a global audience of 302m by 2020. 
The company told media buyers how it projects that Asia will continue to lead the current global eSports market with $333m in revenues, followed by North America with $276m and Europe with $266m.
Reilley: we want to give direction on how it is evolving.
Machinima also announced a new content agency and analytics products aimed at capitalising on the advertising opportunity within eSports for marketers keen to target an often hard to reach demographic of males, with a significant portion of them aged between 25-36 (around 36% of Machinima’s customer base.)
“We are announcing MACH-1 which is a in-house gaming agency that we are launching,” he said. “We have a lot of insights and analytics that we are keen to use in the space.
“This will allow us to take the strategy and execution to clients and agencies and help them get more focused on the opportunities in the space.
“We are also announcing preferred media solutions. That’s about taking a lot of those analytics from a media perspective and using our data and insights to create specified pools of inventory and fan segments to buyers can better target media spend against our audience.”
Nic Christensen in New York
The opportunities presented by the growth of eSports will be discussed at the Mumbrella Sports Marketing Summit on July 28. Click the banner to learn more and get your tickets.
That’s a shot from Halo Wars – not Halo 4!
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@Master Chief – exactly. Gamers are an *extremely* fickle bunch and will treat most messaging with a heavy dose of cynicism. You need to be on your game (pun intended) to get the tone right for them.. We should know, we’ve got the biggest gaming destination on the planet!
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@Beau Ushay – you mean NeoGAF right?!
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Now there’s an idea for a song … Hello, is it Halo 4 you’re looking for?
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