Espo Driving Innovation in Esports Fan Engagement
An interview with Espo CEO and founder, Henry James, on esports and market penetration for telecom operators.
As more and more telecom operators look to develop a long-lasting bond with young customers, esports is fast gaining importance as an innovative way to deliver unique experiences for telecom customers and Espo is right in the middle of this. The UK start-up is powering innovation in terms of helping companies and brands reach the next level of fan engagement in the fast-growing world of esports.
What are some of the key priorities and areas of focus for Espo today?
We’re just a few weeks from launching our esports fan engagement platform, so our key priorities today are very focused on converting our thousands of pre-registered users into happy customers. To do this we’ve been working flatout to offer them exciting and exclusive Fan Perks.
Our platform is unique because it will reward collaboration between world-class esports teams, players, fans and sponsors. Exciting the fans is what the platform will rely upon most of all, so we’ve entered partnerships with 3 world-famous Team Partners to date, with 3 more being announced this month. Each of them will run a series of monthly campaigns on Espo, which will offer exclusive Fan Perks to our users.
This month we also announced our first Brand Partner deal with the premium audio-vision company, Bang & Olufsen. This follows their recent partnerships with XBOX and the Danish esports team, Astralis. Espo is a platform for passionate esports fans and before we started building the platform we carried out interviews with hundreds of esports fans from around the world, asking them about their fan experience and how it could be improved. The result of their feedback is the Espo platform and the wide variety of Fan Perks it will enable.
There are a lot of telecom operators sponsoring esports teams and leagues today. How do you look at this trend?
I see this trend as a show of the times and proof that telecoms are increasingly prioritizing their marketing efforts on younger and more digitally savvy target audiences. Take for example Verizon. [Beginning in 2014 and terminating at the end of the 2019 season] Verizon was the title sponsor of the IndyCar Series, the premier single-seater motorsport in North America, where the average spectator is over the age of 55. I would argue that Verizon’s 5G product propelled their decision to end their IndyCar sponsorship and replace it with sponsorship of a world-famous esports org, FaZe Clan, and the League of Legends Championship Series.
In contrast to the ageing and decreasing size of the IndyCar fanbase, esports boasts 500 millions fans worldwide with YoY double-digit growth and an average spectator age of 26. Through my company DCM, I’ve spent a decade in sports sponsorship and I’ve not witnessed such a drastic shift in the behavior of a telecom sponsor such as the one we’ve seen from Verizon in the past 12 months. I expect this trend to continue as operators bring 5G online in more parts of the world, regardless of the ongoing impact of the global pandemic.
How can Espo look at partnering with telecoms and elevate customer experiences?
We know that telecoms want to capture the attention of younger audiences by staying relevant and being cool. Naturally esports is a great place for telecoms to be and Espo is an ideal advisory and execution partner for companies that want to penetrate the esports demographic. Using telecom as an example, we recognize that the geography of their target market is very clearly defined. Therefore, we would leverage the Espo platform and our Team Partners to focus on reaching esports fans in those key markets.
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Our offering for a telecom operator could involve creating an interactive Fan Perk that rewards users with our EXP loyalty points for their engagement with the telecom operator and our Team Partners. This could be designed in a number of innovative ways, one example being influencer marketing challenges that involve social media interaction between our users, the talent of our Team Partners and the telecom operator. In a covid world, all of the solutions we are currently designing for our Brand Partners involve digital fan engagement.
The esports sector is very multi-faceted and offers huge reach, so there are numerous different ways for corporates to enter esports and — crucially — stay relevant and be cool. However, designing such bespoke solutions wouldn’t be possible without our in-house sponsorship team and delivering these solutions at scale wouldn’t be possible without our fan engagement platform.
What are some of the key geographies that you are focusing on today?
In addition to North America and Europe, we are seeing traction in users pre-registering to Espo from China, India, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia. We are using this data to help us shortlist and decide which esports teams to partner up with next. The combined reach of our Team Partners is in the tens of millions in North America and Europe, and we’ll shortly be announcing the addition of new Team Partners from some of the other markets I just mentioned so that we can start developing reach into these markets too.
What kinds of innovations are being driven by Espo today? What more can we expect from Espo in the coming months?
Espo is the first esports fan engagement platform offering users access to exclusive Fan Perks from multiple esports teams and players all under one roof. We’ve developed in this way simply because we saw a gap in the market and we chose to listen.
A few of the world’s largest esports teams are currently building their own native fan engagement platforms, so we’ve got welcome competition coming into this space. We’re in touch with these teams and we see potential to connect Espo with these native platforms in the future. In the meantime, we are providing ample opportunity for other world-class teams that don’t have the resources to build a native fan engagement platform to partner up with Espo as an effective alternative.
With our upcoming launch, now is the time to demonstrate that our solution matters and how it can change the esports fan engagement landscape. Our mission for Brand Partners is to provide them with superior ROI in the esports sector through tailored fan engagement opportunities, which leverage our tech stack and Team Partners.
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