In a bid to amplify reach and attract more brands on collaborative initiatives, NODWIN Gaming, part of Nazara Technologies (BSE: NAZARA) is ramping up its marketing initiatives. The esports company spent upwards of Rs 50 crore on this effort in the last one year. The company that has created close to 25 IPs in this period expects its marketing spends to grow further in line with their growth.
Alongside spending on ads on gaming and esports platforms, brands are particularly attracted to IPs simply for their popularity and millennial fan following. Naturally, the focus for NODWIN has been creating IPs and new benchmarks around them.
Talking of benchmarks, NODWIN Gaming sold the media rights of its marque property Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) Masters Series to Star becoming the first player to have an esports tournament televised on prime time television.
According to Vishal Parekh, CMO, NODWIN Gaming, this created the opportunity for immense reach for not just the series, but also all the partnering brands.
The series clocked 1.2 million impressions on its opening day, beating the impressions of globally followed tournaments like the Australian Open 2022 that recorded 10.5 lakh impressions on day 1, the French Open day 1 with 6.5 lakh impressions and the UEFA CL semi-finals that saw 4.6 lakh impressions, according to data provided by the company.
In general, the viewership of esports in India is at an all-time high.
As per business intelligence platform Statista, in the financial year 2021, there were around 17 million viewers of esports in India. The number of viewers was almost double that of 2019. It was estimated that in 2025, there would be around 85 million viewers of esports events on 20 different platforms making India one of the fastest growing markets for eSports viewership.
According to a broker research report by Prabhudas Lilladher based on a NDR with Manish Agarwal, CEO of Nazara Technologies Battle Grounds Mobile India (BGMI) Master Series IP telecasted on Star Sports between June-24 and July17 is likely to be profitable from first year itself.
Profitable or not, NODWIN has managed to bag brand deals across categories for the IP.
“Thanks to the viewership, the number of non-endemic brands showing interest in the category has gone up,” says Parekh.
“Initially we would have only the likes of gaming brands, IT players, PC manufacturers, headset manufacturers and storage providers collaborating with us. But the interest in the category is now coming from outside the esports ecosystem. We started off the tournament with just two partners but went on to have seven sponsors on board, which include Swiggy, Hyundai, Spotify, Wings and Gillette,” Parekh adds.
Brand collaborations have been clocking strong revenues in the last two years. According to the latest annual report of Nazara, NODWIN saw a growth momentum in revenues with 74 percent growth in FY 2020- 21 over FY 2019-20.
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