Taking aim at a new, growing market that skews heavily to younger audiences, the eSports Advertising Bureau has formed with an advisory board that includes Turner, Twitch, Major League Gaming, The Madison Square Garden Company, Magid Advisors, and Canoe, the MSO-backed advanced ad joint venture.
The eSports Advertising Bureau said it has formed to provide marketers with the tools to invest “in a sports category that is still widely unknown to advertising brands,” noting that eSports-related revenues are expected to top $1 billion by 2019.
Another study, from SuperData, pegs eSports as a $892 million business that will grow to $1.23 billion by 2019.
Per the site, 2016 Charter Membership is $825 per person, or $2,200 per company for up to three participants. For 2017, Charter Membership will rise to $8,000 per company, with New Member fees of $10,000 per company.
The site also lists out membership benefits that include the coordination of common ad metrics for eSports, the promotion of best practices, and discounts at the organization’s trade events.
“This is a unique situation where there are limited business model or technology barriers to drive significant investment. We just need to make the process so simple that it would be hard not to participate to reach this large desirable audience,” Stuart Lipson, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement.
“With incredible growth potential around eSports and so many questions around the nature of the game play, we found it imperative to align as an industry for the betterment of advertising,” added Seth Ladetsky, senior vice president, Turner Sports Ad Sales. “We plan to share, learn and grow campaigns in and around this sport as we learn ourselves during the debut season of ELEAGUE.”
“This eSports young male audience consumes a large amount of their video viewing on cable VOD, so we thought it a perfect place for Canoe to extend its leadership in driving investment in VOD to categories like eSports that are valuable to focus on,” said Chris Pizzurro, head of business development, sales and marketing Canoe, which is backed by Comcast, Cox Communications and Charter Communications (via Charter’s acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks).
