Belong Gaming Arenas are social spaces for competitive, casual and social gamers. Belong acts as a community hub for local gamers and provides facilities for professional teams to train, amateurs to compete, and grassroots casual gamers to have their birthday parties or just pay to play. A commercial strategy was required to attract brand partnerships that delivered revenue and amplified the brand, whilst building reach to as wide an audience as possible, as Belong was a new proposition with little brand recognition. Belong engaged Strive, a gaming sponsorship agency, to help them build a strategy to attract partnership investment.
Gaming sponsorship agency / Strive’s scope of work
- Define what commercial success looked like and the measurable objectives needed to achieve it
- Establish/refine the brand architecture to make it true to the business, meaningful to the audience, and attractive to sponsors
- Build audience insights to better understand how to grow and engage audiences, demonstrate the opportunity to brands, and deliver value to partner activations
- Develop a clear and investable commercial sponsorship proposition that brands could understand and would want to be part of
- Build a coherent sales narrative that explained the relevant opportunities the festival could offer brands in meeting their objectives
- Develop commercial sponsorship rights and engagement programmes that maximised the value existing partners could enjoy and that could be sold to a potential new partner
- Define the go-to-market strategy to target mutually beneficial partnerships
- Train the partnership management team on how to establish a return on investment (ROI) model for sponsors that both helped maximise and report value
Results
The company was sold to Vindex for $50m USD.
Client comment
Strive is the first agency we have seen that has a unique blend of truly understanding both the gaming and esports scene, whilst having a legacy of proven success in the commercialisation of entertainment.
Need gaming sponsorship help?
If you’re looking for advice from an esports or gaming agency, Strive Sponsorship can help. Contact us for sponsorship, marketing, commercial, content, media, investment, and communications consultancy services.
Frequently asked questions
What does a gaming sponsorship agency do?
A gaming agency can provide an array of different services. In way of example, Strive Sponsorship advises on games marketing and sponsorship strategy (what and who to sponsor), helps negotiate sponsorship deals, and helps brands leverage sponsorships to maximise return on investment (this may involve PR, events, social media content and activations etc).
What companies sponsor gamers?
Gaming sponsorship in the UK has taken off since the COVID pandemic and the rise in prominence in gaming, and gaming content, amongst brand marketers. There are many different brands that sponsor a variety of gaming entities but at its simplest, they can be categorised into two main areas – endemic brands (companies that sell gaming products e.g. HP, Razer, HyperX etc) and non-endemic brands (e.g. Coke, Red Bull, Geico etc).
Is gaming growing in the UK?
About a third of the global population (31%) engages in playing video games on a weekly basis, according to YouGov. There are 39.1m gamers in the UK (source: Newzoo). Gaming boomed during the pandemic giving people a way to be both entertained and connected.
