As part of Mastercard’s sponsorship of the Esports World Cup, this gaming-led media campaign in Saudi Arabia leveraged a Twitch-first, creator-driven strategy to connect with youth audiences through esports and interactive digital experiences. By combining influencer partnerships, advanced audience targeting, and immersive gaming challenges across Twitch and META platforms, the campaign transformed esports sponsorship into a high-attention media activation. The result was strong performance across key digital marketing metrics, including reach, engagement rate, video completion rate, and attention score, demonstrating how brands can use esports marketing, gaming culture, and creator-led media to drive measurable impact and meaningful audience connection.
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Attention Score
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TWITCH VCR
Challenge
As part of Mastercard’s sponsorship of the Esports World Cup, the media campaign aimed to strengthen the brand’s association with youth through gaming while clearly differentiating Mastercard from competitors by highlighting its exclusive role as the sole payment scheme sponsor of the first-ever Esports World Cup.
- Strengthen association with youth through gaming
- Differentiate Mastercard from competitors by highlighting its exclusive role as the sole payment scheme sponsor in the first-ever EWC sponsorship
Solution
Our strategic execution for Mastercard involved leveraging influencer partnerships, targeted advertising, and engaging the gaming community in KSA through innovative audience engagement tactics.
Collaborating with META, we utilized an advanced identity planning and activation platform to target new audiences based on motivational and attitudinal signals, going beyond conventional targeting methods.
Twitch was used as the primary platform, where we negotiated additional media value, including a First Impression Takeover and a prominent Home Page Header.
The campaign featured partnerships with 6 streamers and included two interactive elements:
- Concept 1: Streamers encouraged viewers to share game strategies, rewarding top contributors with tickets to the Esports World Cup in KSA.
- Concept 2: Streamers organized viewers into two teams to compete in Valorant, with the winning team also earning Esports World Cup tickets, enhancing community involvement and gameplay
Result
• Achieved an Attention Score of 86, significantly exceeding the IAS benchmark average of 58, indicating strong creative impact and sustained viewer attention.
• Reached 2.7 million users, delivering 90% higher reach than planned and maximizing visibility among gaming and youth audiences.
• Delivered a 91.15% video completion rate on Twitch, outperforming the 80% benchmark, demonstrating high engagement with long-form, live gaming content.
• Recorded a META engagement rate of 18.9%, nearly 3x higher than the 7% benchmark, driven by interactive and creator-led formats.
• Achieved a 1.57% CTR on creator content, outperforming the 0.5% average CTR, highlighting the effectiveness of influencer partnerships in driving action and interest.
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