Half a month ago, League of Legends World Championship 2020 came to a close in Shanghai. As one of the most well-known e-sports games in the world, it attracted much attention from not only global players but also brands. If people open the official League of Legends World Championship website, they will be surprised to find that this game has so many famous sponsors, including Mercedes-Benz, KFC, Bose, etc.
Attracted by the vast traffic and profits brought by the game industry, more and more brands have realized that cooperating with games is a good way to promote their products.
LPL’s sponsors
The Chinese game industry overview
According to 2020 China Game Industry Report co-launched by China Game Industry Research and Game Press Committee, in the past half-year of 2020, the Chinese game industry’s sales amounted to 139.493 billion yuan, increasing by 22.34% year-on-year. The number of Chinese game players increased by 12.71 million, with a 1.97% growth rate. Mobile game market’s sales reached 104.673 billion yuan, rising by 35.81% and accounting for 75.04% of overall sales[1].
The e-sports industry also thrived. The whole industry’s revenue amounted to 71.936 billion yuan, increasing by 54.69%. Now there are about 484 million e-sports followers in China, and this number is expected to reach 550 million in 2022 while the revenue of the e-sports industry will exceed 160 billion yuan based on a survey report released by Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences[2].
Big brands, such as KFC, NIKE, Mercedes-Benz, etc, also raised their marketing budget on e-sports. BMW announced to sponsor 5 top e-sports clubs worldwide at the beginning of this year.
How do brands “play games”?
There are multiple ways in which brands cooperate with the game industry. Here are three cases.
- Directly sponsor e-sports games/teams
CLEAR, a personal care brand from Unilever, has become the official partner with King Pro League (KPL, the official championship of League of Kings, one of the most popular mobile games in China) since 2019. This year, it further sponsored a unique column named CLEAR Glory Moment. As part of the championship, this column released TOP5 highlight game moment videos every week. This movement helps the brand remain exposure during the whole campaign.
Affected by the pandemic at the beginning of this year, many offline sports were suspended while e-sports games thrived. From January to May in 2020, KPL’s views exceeded 25 billion. Topic #2020KPLWorldChampion# has over 4.22 billion views online, thus propelling the brand’s exposure. [3] Besides, CLEAR and KPL also co-launched a Clear King gift box. Consumers can get scores by buying this gift box. These scores can help players get game equipment and support their favorite KPL e-sports athletes. This activity improved users’ participation and marketing conversion rate.
CLEAR & KPL
- Crossover cooperation
Chicecream, a new domestic ice cream brand, crossover cooperated with One Dream Jianghu, a role-playing mobile game (RPG) in China, to launch a customized ice cream gift box on Qixi, the Chinese version of Valentine’s Day. It was a successful cooperation.
First, these two brands match well. Chicecream is now the most popular high-end domestic ice-cream brand while One Dream Jianghu is a top Chinese-fashion style mobile game. Chinese fashion is the main selling point for both brands. Their target customers are also similar, who are both young consumers.
Second, this cooperation told a sweet story by choosing Qixi as the theme. Many players like the idea sharing the sweet ice-cream with your valentines in the game. To improve interactivity, Chicecream and One Dream Jianghu even put a voice card in every gift box. Consumers can get their own game character voice by scanning the QR code on the card. These voices are specially designed and recorded by voice actors and actresses of the game characters.
This marketing campaign attracted more than 50 million online traffic and also covered more than 20 million game players by in-game mails.
More importantly, Chicecream entered the ACG (Anime, Comics, Games) culture community through this cooperation. ACG culture has been a common interest for most Chinese young consumers with great consumption potential. Reaching this group of consumers through ACG culture will definitely impress them, thereby becoming beneficial to the brand’s further development.
Chicecream & One Dream Jianghu
- In-game advertising
Darlie promoted a successful in-game advertising campaign with FoodTalk, a mobile game in China. This cooperation characterize Darlie as a teacher, called Mr. Black who was then incorporated into the game as an NPC (Non-playable character). In the game, Mr. Black would then interact with players. Outside the game, Darlie’s official weibo account is also called Mr. Black to further interact with consumers.
Later, Darlie and FoodTalk even launched a fan fiction competition to encourage players to create their own stories about Mr. Black and the main characters in the game.
This virtual character, Mr. Black, was loved by many players, leading to dozens of times the traffic to the brand.
Darlie & FoodTalk: Mr. Black
Another form of in-game advertisements is the modeling of real-life products and incorporating them into the game itself. This can be seen in the various guns and equipment available to the user in the massively popular third person shooter, PUBG (later renamed as Game for Peace in China) which achieved over $200 million in a single month (May 2020), with the Chinese market owing to 53% of that success [4].
In conclusion, game and e-sports are a new booming industry in China. It can provide many innovative marketing strategies for brands. Since most game players are young people, cooperation with games and e-sports can also give brands more exposure to this specific group of consumers. The potential for game marketing is as unlimited as the consumption base of the gaming industry.
