Exclusive interview: How ESL is experimenting with TikTok broadcasts to reach new audiences

Wasif Ahmed Published 13/07/2026

While most esports fans watch pros compete in their favorite titles on their PCs, laptops, or tablets, more and more fans are tuning into vertical esports broadcasts.

That’s why tournament organizers such as ESL have to adapt and constantly implement new ideas to improve the vertical viewing experience on platforms like TikTok.

During IEM Cologne 2026, we had the opportunity to pick the brain of EFG’s Senior Director of Media Rights and Distribution, Georg Brandes, about how they are going about improving their vertical broadcasts and their partnership with TikTok.

When you’re designing a broadcast for TikTok vertical viewing, how are you going about it from a production side?

Brandes: It’s a very exciting topic, because, first of all, we see a lot of users on mobile devices. 56% of users are actually coming in from mobile. And obviously, we want to be where that audience is.

When we look at TikTok, it’s obviously a discoverability platform for us in the first place. So it’s a lot of users, more than half of Gen Z, who are effectively on their TikTok accounts every day. So, you want to make sure that you capture that audience.

But for me, it’s a very exciting opportunity to think about how we make that short window that people are just crawling through their timeline “sticky”. So that they actually think “this is exciting for me”. And then we create some type of experience around that. There’s a lot of thinking around that, and it’s not easy. We are trying to find out what works and what doesn’t work.

So how do you make the TikTok broadcasts “sticky”?

There are two ways of how you want to think about it. There’s a way of a lean back element where you just bring in more features that are not present or are shown to you in a different way.

Because obviously, on the phone in the first place, a vertical broadcast on a phone is not ideal. Because of course, when you do a production, you’re very limited. You can’t basically produce a different version of the broadcast for every device that’s out there.

So traditionally, you want to focus on what’s working on the PC screen. Of course, it also works on the TV screen when you have a bigger canvas. But when you think about a phone, and you look at it even horizontally, some of the economy, some of the smallest things that are happening on the HUD are so small that you can barely see them.

But not everything is equally important all the time. So when you rotate your device, it actually gives you more room to bring some of those elements closer to your attention.

So then in certain elements of the broadcast, we show the map because of the rotation in the game; people would be curious to see how that actually plays out on the map. When we are in the buy phase, we show the economy, and we show which items the different players are actually buying.

When a bomb is placed, you want to show the whole thing goes red and whatever. These are all the elements that we bring in, new ideas that we bring in, that are just a use of the different canvas. There’s a lot of blank canvas on that broadcast that we can now utilize.

Of course, we’re also bringing in sponsorship messages. I shouldn’t forget about that one. But there’s another element, which is community-led, which is not something that we have done yet, and it’s something that we’re exploring as we always explore new opportunities.

But there is something of more engagement level. Think about it as chatbot interactions. There’s a feature called Double Tap on TikTok, which shows your engagement with the broadcast. Think about barometers, or heat meters, and suddenly something explodes, or whatever. You can gamify it a bit.

We’re thinking about that. It’s not easy to apply because there’s a lot of development needed for it. But clearly, we want to understand what works.

Right now, what we’re doing with the features that we have applied already, with what I said more as a lean backward experience, is already very “sticky”.

We see tremendous growth in watch time and tremendous growth in actual concurrent viewers. So the success that we’re seeing with TikTok is very encouraging.

Is TikTok’s role to bring viewers to the main broadcast, or is it a part of the main broadcast itself?

It’s not easy. Of course, we want to see, first of all, the way we look at this is that it’s a new audience. Esports, in its main demographic, is still effectively people who are looking for the broadcast. They know when the games are on. People are tuning in because they know about it. TikTok is a way to broaden that audience.

We have more than a million followers on TikTok naturally, so we’re already part of their timeline. But TikTok is a very good platform as well that brings in new audiences, especially Gen Z, and makes that audience accessible to us. It’s a building-the-brand exercise in the first place. But, of course, the thesis goes, you discover it on your small screen.

Then you say, oh, yeah, it’s on. Maybe I’m going to put it on the telly, or I’m going to my PC, and I’m actually going to watch the whole thing.

How do you track that? It’s almost impossible because the numbers can’t give you anything in that nature. But, yes, there is an element of people who probably see it there and then want to watch the whole thing.

Image credit: EFG

Are you not worried about diluting the main ESL broadcast viewership with TikTok?

Not at all, because it’s additive, and we really believe that people that are so engaged with it, even though the vertical broadcast brings in a lot of new elements to it, at the end of the day, if you’re really into it and you really want to watch it, a mobile experience can only ever give you so much because the screen has a certain size limitation.

We want to make it as good as possible, but there’s no reason to think that we’re actually cannibalizing anything from what we’re already doing.

Are sponsors asking to be on the vertical broadcast as they are on the horizontal?

We see a lot of interesting questions coming in that people are actually interested in what we’re doing there. There are a couple of new commercial opportunities, maybe, but at this point, it’s more of a test and learn for us.

We’re starting to see what is actually sticking, and then we want to see how sponsors react to it.

Obviously, we give the same brands that we already have partnered with us, we’re going to give them visibility there too, but at this stage, we don’t have anything TikTok-dedicated.

When events are produced, does vertical viewing come into consideration, or are they produced for the horizontal viewing experience, and then the people who work on the vertical have to make do with what they have?

At the time being, the way we use the 16×9 horizontal broadcast is still the main product. Who knows what the future will bring? We see a lot of interesting developments with what Netflix does and others that are doing vertical original programming by now, and of course, we closely monitor everything that is happening with YouTube Shorts and so forth.

But at this stage, vertical is yet to have proven what it actually means for live sports. Everybody is trying to do different things with clipping and with these types of things.

So, it’s quite exciting to see the development, but at this stage, I don’t want to call it an afterthought because clearly, for us, it’s baked into our organic thinking of how we think about broadcasting and how we produce it. So it’s baked into the production, but it doesn’t shape what the production currently looks like.

How are you measuring the success of your TikTok broadcasts right now?

First of all, the main KPI is always watch time. We want to see an increase in watch duration and, of course, the overall concurrent viewers, total watch time that we see, and this is obviously all data that we get from the platforms.

Featured image credit: ESL FACEIT Group (EFG)

Wasif Ahmed

About Wasif Ahmed

Wasif Ahmed is the Lead Esports Editor for WIN.gg. He has been covering esports for nearly eight years, although his gaming journey started much earlier, when he was just four years old and was introduced to Road Rash on a dusty PC. Hit him up on X to talk about esports, why partnership models are the best fit for esports games, or if Halo 7 has finally been announced.

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