So you think you know about esports
The newsletter of the podcast
Tl;dr
Anatomy of a conversation: Ralf Reichert
Chair news
eMoney Talks
Personal Best: Lauren Bergin
There are no bad ideas in sports PR
Kevin Keegan, sports marketing pioneer
Nice Threads
Sentenced: Jeff Bezos on shoes
Sportsbiz Objects No.8 The Agency Whiteboard
Pioneer is an overused word, but…
Ralf Reichert was there at the start.
The ESL Gaming co-founder has been one of the architects of esports since the mid 90s, by first creating SK Gaming and then as CEO of Turtle Entertainment, the world's largest eSports company, he’s played an integral part in the development of ESL Gaming….hear this week’s UP Pod#142.
Founded in 2000, ESL operates high profile, branded international leagues and tournaments such as ESL One, Intel® Extreme Masters, ESL Pro League and other top tier stadium-size events, as well as ESL National Championships, grassroots amateur cups and matchmaking systems, defining the path from zero to hero as short as possible. With offices all over the world, ESL is leading esports forward on a global scale. ESL is a part of MTG, the leading international digital entertainment group.
Listen to the Ralf Reichert conversation in full here.
Anatomy of a conversation: The Ralf Reichert Timeline
[00:01:31] The touching faux regret of a middle aged man who missed out on gaming culture.
[00:02:26] The search for escapism; the gap between who we are and who we want to be; the necessary complexity of escape games.
[00:05:59] The mistakes football clubs make when building an esports team; marketing v performance; asking the wrong questions and the cliches of demographic segmentation.
[00:11:54] Is it useful to apply sports biz tropes to esports? Questions about the Overwatch League, the Kraft project and the philosophical differences between open and closed leagues; the limits of viewing esports through the lens of American v European sports models but we do it anyway cos its fun and all we know.
[00:19:30] The esports journey since 2000, the stigma of gaming and parental misunderstandings; things that should have happened by now and haven’t and maybe never will.
[00:23:58] The massive market power of game publishers; Riot, Valve, Blizzard and their different philosophies toward esports; the utopian view of gaming and the hard core that will always hate esports.
[00:26:42] The commercial risk of running a business in someone else’s world; the illusion of risk and the size of the pie question. ‘It’s a good pie, perhaps a great pie’.
[00:28:42] Second guessing Amazon's esports ambitions; the future media landscape and its impending irrelevance; the lessons of 2010; how monetisation models change slowly then suddenly; End to end sponsor stories, brand land grabs and sport sponsorship rights zero sum games.
[00:37:39] Footballers as creators, the wonky Galacticos comparison; Lionel Messi is a bit boring but that’s ok, we don’t need him to entertain us on YouTube; the unreliable Otro experiment.
[00:45:37] Lots of flashy entries, not many hefty exits. “We are in the mid nineties of football. Anyone who exits now is frankly not the smartest dude on the planet…”.
[00:50:59] Hilarity ensues.
Meanwhile, emoney continues to talk
esportswashing
Among his other hobbies, Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia plays Call of Duty.
Bloomberg notes MBS’ Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia has been buying up $3.3bn of esports publisher stock.
14.9 million Activision Blizzard shares worth $1.4 billion
7.4 million Electronic Arts shares worth $1.1 billion
3.9 million Take-Two Interactive shares worth $826 million
Liquid(ity)
Team Liquid has launched Liquid Plus - a fee paying fan membership scheme. Usually, direct revenue for teams comes via sponsorships, merchandise and scraps from ads from streaming/content. Without owning a venue or ticketing, digital relationships are critical to realising the monetization potential of the audience - expect to see other teams follow suit.
As one esports insider on the UP WhatsApp group (WhatsUP…) noted, Liquid’s sub move is not bound with crowd funding or IPO as fnatic and Astralis did recently respectively.
China seeks Immortals
Immortals Gaming Clubs (IGC) had acquired, at great expense, the LA franchise in the Overwatch League - the world's first city based esports franchise league. Now that same franchise has been uprooted and relocated to China.
‘People’ are talking.
As discussed in the Ralf Reichert podcast, Overwatch is an attempt to meld esports with the tropes of US major league purpose built franchise models. What we don’t quite know is whether the Immortals to China story is about China’s esports strategy, a weakness in the Overwatch concept or a Covid-driven marriage of inconvenience. Maybe a bit of all three?
Personal Best
Sportsbiz people list their favourite things
Lauren Bergin, Espo
A definite esports vibe to this week’s UP output and I for one will be clicking on this image to see who complete’s Lauren’s dinner party invite list.
There are no bad ideas in sports PR
Man of the Match Makhaya Ntini receives a lawn mower. Ireland v South Africa, 2003.
Nice threads
Happy 70th Kevin Keegan, sports marketing pioneer
Sentenced
Jeff Bezos, 2016: "From a business POV for us, we get to monetize the content in an unusual way. When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes in a very direct way."
Sportsbiz Objects
No.8 The Agency Whiteboard
#Creativity #Ideas
It was a Tuesday afternoon and I had a breakdown in the Lemsip war room.
This is not as dangerous as it sounds; marketing people like to couch what they do in military terms to lend drama to what otherwise might be seen as a small cubicle of whiny millennials overthinking the future of powdered decongestant.
On the white boards around us were phrases like ‘storytelling arc’, ‘ladder up’ and - for reasons we’ll come to in a moment - ‘Martina Hingis’.
Our job was to attack Lemsip’s market leading position via the thrillingly counterintuitive route of women’s tennis.
The client - ‘a disruptive challenger brand’, obvs - had recently paid through the nose for some tennis rights.
These were not for premium events you’ve ever heard of.
They were filler; the stuff that populates minority sports channels most afternoons, watched by a demographic of pensioners, people in bank queues and low risk prisoners on day release.
“What about a subscription service?” said Millennial number 1. “My mum buys our dog food on a monthly contract, why don’t we do the same thing with cold remedies, and the tennis could be thrown in as added value content”.
“You always say that,” said Millennial number 2.
And she was right. It’s the immutable law of the whiteboard; There exists no marketing challenge that cannot be countered with the phrase: ‘What about a subscription service?’
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