Game-fluencers

In August 2019, Fortnite megastar Tyler Blevins, better known as Ninja, entered a multi-year partnership with Adidas, marking the first collaboration of its kind for the sportswear brand. Blevins is not a typical gamer—he made a name for himself as a colorful entertainment personality on Amazon’s Twitch streaming platform before moving to Microsoft’s Mixer in August 2019. In his debut videofor Adidas, the 28-year-old broadly aligns himself with more traditional types of influential creatives, like artists and musicians, and says that “partnering with Adidas is a chance to join a family that celebrates fellow creators at the top of their game.”

This isn’t the first time a sportswear brand has tapped esports culture. K-Swiss entered an agreement in 2018 to supply footwear for esports team Immortals, while earlier in 2019 in China, Nike signed a deal to become the official and exclusive apparel and footwear partner for League of Legends Pro League(LPL) players. The company even tappedLPL player Jian “Uzi” Zhao to appear in one of its campaigns alongside basketball celebrity LeBron James—the first time Nike has featured esports in its marketing.

These collaborations come at a time when 18-to-25-year-olds are spending more time watching gamers on online streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch than watching traditional spectator sports, accordingto data published in 2018 by Limelight Networks. As of May 2018, Twitch boasted 15 million daily active users, although that figure represents total viewers across all of the platform’s various live streaming categories, not just gamers.

“Influencer marketing in gaming is a massive opportunity which is highly underutilized versus other verticals like fashion and beauty,” says Charlie Baillie, the cofounder of esports media company Ampverse, which launched in August 2019 in Southeast Asia—the fastest-growing market for gaming, according to Newzoo.

“Brands have historically been cautious when approaching gaming as it’s somewhat of the unknown. However, the scale at which talent is building audience—particularly mobile gamers—simply can’t be ignored now,” he says. “The myth that gaming is exclusively teenage boys in dark bedrooms is absolutely untrue.”

Influencer marketing campaigns in these spaces are no longer exclusive to brands that typically advertise to sports and video game enthusiasts. For Valentine’s Day 2019, Hong Kong-based fine jeweler Chow Sang Sang partnered with Tencent mobile game Honor of Kings in China to launch game-themed necklaces and bracelets to appeal to female consumers—Weibo estimated that in 2018, about 63% of its audience for Honor of Kings pro league games was female. MAC also created a set of lipsticks based around five different characters in the game—an idea inspiredby the fact that gen Z players were already referencing the brand when customizing their characters’ virtual lip colors. To spread the word, MAC partnered with pop idols from hit reality TV show Produce 101.