Marketing To Gen Z: What Developers Can Learn From Esports

Even a few years ago, few people could have predicted just how quickly and how big eSports would grow. It may even have outstripped that other great phenomenon of recent times, the online casino sector.

Alongside this phenomenon, the budgets spent on advertising and marketing have also expanded hugely. In 2017 the figure was estimated at around $124 million, but by 2023 it had grown over five times higher at $623 million.

This huge increase underlines the fact that the marketing must be working. After all, no marketer goes on throwing money at something that is offering no returns.

Within this there are some very valuable lessons to be learned for any businesses looking to appeal to that elusive group of consumers, Gen Z.

Born in an age when traditional media like TV, billboards and print ads have been very much in decline, new ways are always being sought in how to get through to this elusive and unpredictable group.

So it makes sense to look to a sector that seems to be getting it right and advancing its own cause in the process.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship has been a mainstay of sports marketing for many years now. You won’t find many team shirts without a sponsor’s logo or two on them. On Formula 1 cars you can hardly see the car’s paintwork behind them.

But eSports has shown that to appeal to its target market, namely Generation Zers, it’s more complex than this. There has to be a genuine connection and reason behind the sponsorship.

This can come from some fairly unexpected sources. For example logistics company DHL has become a highly successful and high-profile sponsor in the eSports arena even with a robot mascot effiBot making regular appearances at tournaments.

It all comes down to understanding the triggers that will get buy-in from the latest generation of gamers and leveraging them as much as possible.

Influencers

This is also the generation of influencers. Self-appointed experts who utilise social media, and the whole feeling that they are bringing an online community together with their posts on TikTok, YouTube and the like.

In the eSports arena, it’s the gamers who have the highest profiles on Twitch who tend to have the strongest influence and the largest number of followers. This makes them credible, relatable and real.

This does mean that the product you’re hoping to market needs to be a natural fit – something that followers will believe is genuinely appealing to the influencer. A good example of this is Bang energy drink. Its inclusion in the past has been as subtle as simply appearing in influencer videos. No hard sell and no cheesy words put into the influencers’ mouths. Just marketing by association.

Targeted ads

These have been proving to be increasingly successful in eSports and appear in different forms. They generally pop up in games as they are being played, seen by viewers, but not distracting to those who are in the heat of battle.

By appearing in specific games, this allows the approach to be fairly tightly targeted towards followers of the particular game. A level of subtlety, essential if you’re not going to alienate Gen Zers, is also provided by weaving them into the fabric of the game being played.

For developers looking to sharpen up their own marketing, this is a particularly obvious route as they have overall control of what goes into their game.

Advergaming

This is another area that is of real relevance to the development community. There are now several examples of brands associated with eSports devising their own games to promote themselves. 

To return to the example of DHL their effiBot game has certainly managed to catch the imagination and even has an annual world championships.

Admittedly a costly and slightly risky business – the game has to be good and worth playing – advergaming promises a great return on investment if you do manage to get it right.

Storytelling and authenticity

Above all, what Gen Zers are looking for is a combination of brand storytelling and authenticity. 

They need to know what a brand stands for, how it’s got to the position that it’s in today and why they should give it headspace in their busy lives.

It also has to have a role to play in their wider social circle.

So great care needs to be made to make prospective customers feel inspired to connect for their own reasons, not just to satisfy the demands of some faceless marketing department at an anonymous brand.

The visceral excitement of eSports has managed to make it the ideal backdrop for these sorts of messages to land with great effect. If you, as a developer, can learn from this and deploy it yourself then success with Gen Z won’t be far away at all.