Mentioned in this article Games: League of Legends

Esports sponsorships have long been a question of quantity over quality. As the industry continues to grasp sustainability, brands have tried to weigh the growing availability of screen time, with little understanding of its overall value. As a result, media consultancy companies have rushed into the space, pondering how traditional sports valuations measure up against native digital competitors.

Sports intelligence agency Gemba is taking a more holistic approach. Having provided insight and strategy to multiple rights holders in the sporting world—including World Rugby and the Tour De France—when the company launched its sponsorship valuation platform, Turnstile, it did so consciously with esports in mind.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Robert Mills, Gemba CEO:

“While there’s not necessarily a lot of branding opportunities in esports, the opportunities that are there are pound for pound stronger…”[/perfectpullquote]

Gemba CEO, Robert Mills, told TEO that esports became a personal interest of his when he visited Korea in 2002 for the FIFA World Cup and saw how advanced Korean gaming was.

“I’d probably say about four years ago was really the tipping point, where both brands and rights holders were looking for more sophisticated metrics around esports, and how it fits into the broader sports-entertainment ecosystem as well.”

Having been in development for over two years, Turnstile is designed to let customers evaluate esports and gaming sponsorships—and not just the exposure of, say, a logo placement, but its intellectual property value as well.

“I think the overall observation, of the nature of esport and gaming, is it’s a very engaged environment,” says Mills. “It’s not a passive, sit on the couch thing.”

Mills makes clear that there’s a distinction between the different types of sponsorship offerings currently available in esports. “On the one hand there’s the sports games, such as NBA2K , FIFA , and Formula 1, which replicate the traditional sports broadcast.”

Case in point, several traditional sports leagues are already looking to mimic the brand exposure methods that worked so well for them in physical sports. The NBA 2K League, for example, will sell advertisements from within the league’s in-game court, while having its competitors play digital basketball exclusively with Dell Alienware processors and monitors, as Intel powers its studio broadcasts,

“On the other hand, you have games like League of Legends , where the branding is not embedded within the game, but on the athletes themselves,” says Mills. As TEO showed in our EU LCS and NA LCS jersey sponsor report last year, the sheer volume of logos to be found on player apparel dwarves that of most major traditional sports, regardless of whether the brand in question is endemic or non-endemic.

“While there’s not necessarily a lot of branding opportunities in esports, the opportunities that are there are pound for pound stronger than more static signage and logo placement you might see in traditional sport,” Mills says.

In the original Turnstile launch announcement, Mills noted that the industry “does not need more media equivalencies—it needs a robust approach to pricing, using actual benchmarks.” When asked to elaborate on this point, Mills told TEO that this is a major issue in sports overall. Essentially, equivalency means you can’t provide the buyer or seller a clear understanding of what the appropriate price for a sponsorship is.

“You might have an asset that’s costing $1M, but has an equivalency of $10M,” he says. “If we’re thinking about esports, where there is not necessarily lots of logo exposure, it’s a pretty clean environment compared to traditional sport. That doesn’t really do justice that you’ve got massive communities of people that are supporting these teams and leagues.”

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One of Gemba’s long-term clients—one developing its own corner of the esports market—is the Formula One Group. As a pilot partner for the platform, Turnstile helped the championship (and its relatively new parent owner Liberty Media) to reframe its approach to valuing sponsorship assets.

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Murray Barnett, F1: “Esports, traditional sports, or any kind of sponsorship—brands are looking for a lot more clarity and detail around the metrics of their success.”[/perfectpullquote]



Murray Barnett, the recently recruited global head of sponsorship and commercial partnerships for F1, says esports sponsorships—like regular sports sponsorships—looks at fairly rudimentary metrics, such as number of participants, likes and shares on social, and views on various platforms.

“Whilst certainly important components within the mix, these don’t necessarily tell you anything about the way that somebody’s feeling about your product,” he says. “Esports, traditional sports, or any kind of sponsorship—brands are looking for a lot more clarity and detail around the metrics of their success.”

For F1, this includes longtime partner DHL, which not only renewed its deal with the sport, but also became the first official partner of F1’s new esports series. Looking at the distinction between the way native esports and virtual sports approach advertising, Barnett said for now F1 would approach logos and brands the same way it does in the original F1, but it is looking at other possibilities as well. “Because of the development time, it will probably be another year or two after that to see more complex commercial integrations into the actual esport.”

Esports as an industry is always noted for its speed. While other entertainment industries look to embrace live streaming, it sits at the heart of esports.

That said, live gaming events have lag behind when it comes to premium event packages. Robert Mills attended the League of Legends World Championship semi-final in Shanghai last year, and while he was able to see the sold out stadium first-hand, he also saw that there was no premium hospitality available for the event.

“That to me, probably, suggests an opportunity, whereby creating a new inventory or lifting the price of existing inventory,” he says. “The more transparent, and more quantifiable we can make the benefits, the easier it is for a brand to sell that internally. If it’s just a headline number and there’s no breakdown of value, it’s hard for that brand to sell that internally.”