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Marketing and Sponsorship

ELeague holds steady on sponsorship pricing

Turner Sports will keep the price of sponsoring ELeague “about the same” in 2017 despite executives’ belief that the launch year was a success, said Seth Ladetsky, senior vice president of sales.

Turner and joint venture partner WME-IMG are in the market, hoping to renew six inaugural-year deals and find first-time buyers in the beer, mortgage, insurance and telecom categories. An official marketing partnership sold for $2 million in 2016 and includes media exclusivity on the TBS telecasts and Twitch streaming coverage, marketing and logos, product placement and sponsor integration.

“We do think the IP rights, the marks and rights, have increased in value, for sure, because it’s more established now,” Ladetsky said. “But in general, we’re still in a launch year.”

ELeague launched last May to meager linear TV ratings but acclaim in the world of professional video gaming. Fans gave it high marks for maintaining the authenticity and cultural appeal of gaming while exposing it to a more mainstream audience.

Turner gave make-goods to some sponsors after impressions fell short of promises, Ladetsky acknowledged, mostly in the first spring/summer season. “We’re pretty happy with our overall audience as a whole.” Telecasts in the spring/summer season averaged 249,000 viewers, and viewership increased 10 percent in the fall season, Turner said, though executives say linear ratings don’t tell the whole story in a digitally native sport.

On Jan. 3, Dell announced the first deal of 2017, for one year in the personal computer hardware category, which it will use to promote its Alienware line of gaming-specific machines. All ELeague competition will use Alienware computers and monitors.

For last year’s two separate seasons, ELeague secured six sponsors, four of them selling food: Buffalo Wild Wings (casual dining), Hyper-X (headphones), Credit Karma (personal finance), Arby’s (quick-serve restaurants), Domino’s (pizza), and Snickers (chocolate bar). All were one-year deals.

Play starts up again Jan. 22-29 at the ELeague Major, a one-off Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament with a $1 million prize pool. Turner expects to close additional sponsorships by then.

While esports remains an experiment for most non-endemic sponsors, ELeague is an attractive buy because it’s packaged in a way familiar to marketers, said David Rosenberg, an esports consultant and chief strategy officer at GMR Marketing.

That’s not to say ELeague doesn’t come along with its own unpredictability as organizers continue to tinker in consultation with players and teams. Between the spring and fall seasons in 2016, ELeague cut the overall competition content in half, slicing the season from 10 weeks to five, and cutting each week from four days to two.

Some of the sales conversations are trending toward multiyear deals, Ladetsky said, but it’s tough sledding.
“It’s very hard to do multiyear deals in this space because games change and schedules are so fluid,” he said. “It’s more of a verbal understanding and then we in good faith negotiate in the long term.”

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