Making Esports History as Shirt Sponsor of Natus Vincere

Overview

Having experienced a surge in popularity of their RAID: Shadow Legends game following a two-year user acquisition campaign, game developer Plarium worked with SportQuake to develop an industry-first esports sponsorship strategy to maintain momentum and continue to reach new audiences.

The Challenge

RAID: Shadow Legends had experienced a meteoric rise since launch in 2017, both in terms of revenue generation and global popularity, reaching over 50m downloads following a performance marketing-based user acquisition campaign. With this approach reaching a natural limit, Plarium decided the time was right to explore alternative ways to maintain momentum and attract new audiences to the game.

 

The Solution

Following an extensive analysis of game developer activity in sports sponsorship, SportQuake worked with Plarium to develop a shirt sponsorship strategy with Ukrainian esports powerhouse Natus Vincere for four key reasons:

Hyper Targeted Audience – RAID: Shadow Legends is a unique product with a large focus on core gamers. By partnering with an esports team, Plarium could drive awareness among a gaming-enthused esports audience in the exact key demographic they wanted to attract.

Immediate Brand Awareness – As an esports shirt sponsor, Plarium would drive huge coverage at all team activity including competitions, live streams and players appearances.

Key Market Fit – Battle royale game CS:GO is a particularly popular title in RAID: Shadow Legend’s key markets. NAVI are the world’s best CS:GO team so the partnership would resonate particularly strongly in the territories most important to Plarium.

Influencer Marketing – Esports sits in a sweet spot between digital sports and influencer marketing. The partnership would create a number of activation opportunities around influencer marketing, most notably with S1mple, an esports legend and NAVI member.

The Result

The partnership launched in January 2021 ahead of a series of major esports events in which NAVI were taking part – and eventually dominated – bringing major attention to the team, the game and the partnership itself.

Plarium amplified awareness further using a variety of tools, from PR activities to over 150 influencer marketing campaigns devoted to spreading the message to all relevant audiences and channels.

The sponsorship with NAVI represented a completely new, exciting marketing activity for the brand. Sergey Bragilevskiy, Director of Marketing: “The NAVI partnership is a completely different marketing activity for us…It is like our influencer marketing campaigns, but with much more organic buzz. It invited new discussions and talk in the industry and, of course, introduced all-new memes. Bottom line: It garnered attention”.

Find Out More

To find out more about Plarium’s partnership with NAVI, contact Pat McColgan at [email protected]