HOLLYWOOD, Florida — If you thought the Super Bowl was the place advertisers can make the biggest impact with sports viewers, it may be time to step in to the 21st Century.
Right now, hundreds of thousands of consumers around the world are watching each other play video games. And those broadcasts are proving to be lucrative.
So much so that Turner Sports started up its own esports league last year. Why did the company launch Eleague? In a video interview with Beet.TV, Turner Sports sales SVP Seth Ladetsky explains.
“It’s an insanely passionate growth of (the) young-male demo(graphic). (It’s the) same 20-year-old demographic (as physical sport), (but a) different psychographic.
“They’re spending hours and hours a day around gaming and esports. We want to be around it. It’s important to do it authentically and be respectful.”
The way Turner is deploying Eleague says much about the new state of media. Most of the match-ups are broadcast on YouTube and Twitch, the video game broadcast platform now owned by Amazon.
But it doesn’t stop there. “It’s a digital footprint that leads up to the television culmination,” Latesky adds. “The grand finales are on TBS. The final two or three hours are on television.”
Esports pulls huge crowds, and now TV companies are getting involved to pursue similarly large numbers of die-hards. In the UK last year, Sky and ITV combined to launch GINX TV, a 24-hour esports network.
Turner Sports has already seen big audiences. “We did a million concurrent streams globally,” Latesky exclaims. “We see this massive audience of young males and now we’re reaching them.”
What’s the upshot, commercially speaking? “Due to our relationships in the sports world, a lot of non-endemic sponsors have come on board,” Ladestky says.
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
