So let's talk about your interest in eSports. When did your interest actually start in eSports?
I've always been a gamer, through and through. I played a ton of FIFA and NHL and various sports games growing up. My dad being at Sony meant we had games consoles all over the place, but it was a very different world back then. Nowadays, life has caught up! Despite being in esports, it’s the same as being in sports, you don’t get too much time to get involved. We don’t really know normal working hours in either industry!
When I was at Formula E, we used gaming as a one off marketing activation to take the Prost vs Senna rivalry and bring it up to date for a new generation. What was a one off turned into 6 months of activation and I quickly became entrenched in learning more about the industry, the culture.
I visited some of the big 70k attendee events and the grass roots ones run on CRT monitors, the really hardcore scenes, and you start to gain much more of an appreciation for the player’s skill levels and craft, the potential the industry has.
I've been lucky enough to experience it from a brand perspective at Formula E, from a team perspective at NRG and from a league perspective, all in the last 2 years. I’ve seen almost all sides to the industry and whilst in many people’s eyes it’s a relatively nascent industry, at it’s core it’s been around for 15-20 years now.
It’s just that now, the new generation of fans and behavior trends we see in traditional sports are bringing awareness to the industry that’s never been seen before.
As you know, we’re just forming this new steering committee about eSports for the SEAT Dallas program. I think there's a lot of opportunity for individuals like yourself and others to share insights and perspectives from the business side of how to leverage unique synergies between eSports and pro sports.
What do you see is one of the biggest challenges facing eSports today?
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Everyone wants in and there’s this kind of gold rush to an extent due to our core demographic (15-25yr old males). They’re the next generation of fan, be that entertainment or sports.
They rarely have a traditional cable subscription, 75% have access to an OTT subscription platform, they consume content so differently to the generations before them.
Regardless of the demographic, perception of the industry is still a huge challenge.
When you speak to the endemic brands, the technology companies of this world, the Hewlett Packards, the IBMs, the Dells, it's an easy sell as to what you're trying to achieve with them, but non endemics can still be quite dismissive. You know they have this perception that the industry is yet to go mainstream, which is a little bit of a myth to be honest.
North America has been pretty receptive to esports, but there’s still a mis-conception that the participants are the basement-dwelling boys playing Call of Duty
That couldn’t be further from the truth in that top tier skill level. These guys are earning $150,000 a year. They've got structured training, health regimes. We had a live in chef, a live in physio. So the industry has come a very long way in a very, very short amount of time. I remember pitching Visa when I was at Formula E and it was a six figure fee we were asking for from them for naming rights to our esports program. They'd obviously done their research, they were keen to put a marker down, but no one had really done that at the time. down in the space. But no one like Visa had really looked at it in that sense.
The brands and teams gaining traction and credibility in the space are the ones who are taking that risk and looking to engage the demographic authentically.
87