TNL ESPORTS BRAND TRACKER 032: Visa
TNL eSports Brand Tracker 036: Visa (Photo: Formula E)
TNL Take: The first EU Financial Services Brand makes the eSports investment with Visa Europe's Sponsorship of Formula E's eSports Pro Series.
This deal makes sense for a few reasons:
/01 CONTENT FIT
Visa has long been associated with Auto Racing and is currently a Sponsor of Formula E's main electric Racing Series. Overlapping that Sponsorship into eSports is a no brainer and they may not even have paid that much.
/02 LIVE EVENTS
Along with sponsoring the live streaming eSports events, Visa gets an opportunity to activate onsite at Racing events as they did recently in London.
Visa London ePrix eSports Event (Photo: Formula E)
/03 DISTRIBUTION
This was more than likely known when the deal was announced in April, but Formula E and Visa also get distribution on UK's 24/7 eSports channel, Ginx TV, through a recent deal.
While those are all good there's one very big challenge.
Racing eSports has no audience
While I've said this before - and believe this will change over time - it's very challenging to drive viewership for Racing eSports as 2016 is basically Year Zero for the genre.
Here's the audience for a June race:
Who was the audience for the London ePrix event when I checked?
Me.
Racing eSports Lack of Audience (Photo: Twitch)