Overview
Vodafone Giants is one of the most successful European esports clubs. After 13 years, they’ve left an imprint on the esports scene in Spain with their achievements. Vodafone Giants have won multiple championships across such games as Call of Duty, CS:GO, Valorant, FIFA, Rocket League, Fighting Games, and League of Legends. The Giants compete in 10 different games and have more than 50 professional players plus several content creators. Between the social accounts of the club, players, and creators, they have more than 28 million followers. Giants also have a strong footing in the sponsorship space, working with some of the top brands in the world like Vodafone, Nike, Nesquik, KitKat, and Red Bull. In 2017, Vodafone Giants partnered with Blinkfire Analytics.
Challenge
The Giants often attend six to seven events around Spain every year and offer several activations to their sponsors. When the pandemic halted events in March 2020, the Giants had to reimagine their strategy and content to reach audiences and drive value for sponsors. With the virtual nature, the Giants organization had to make sure their social media reporting was streamlined and as real-time as possible. Also, the team needed to include their owned and operated accounts, but also players and content creators.
Another challenge, but more so a marketing initiative for the team, was incorporating an ambitious rebrand in May 2021. The rebrand included their logo and corporate image (as you will see both old and new logos used throughout the case study).
Solution
Because Vodafone Giants couldn’t attend events, they relied on social media and digital media. Blinkfire was an important platform for the club, helping them show their partners the value driven. With an enormous amount of content and partnership requests, Blinkfire proved invaluable when it came to real-time tracking and reporting. The club relied on two specific Blinkfire features: Playlists and Group Channels. The Giants sent playlists of posts to brand partners highlighting content series, top posts, and sponsorship exposure. The Group Channels feature allowed the club to add players and creators to a specific Group in order to track their social media metrics like engagements and views.
One of the keys of our work is to elaborate the best possible reports. In the esports industry, you have to be creative, and Blinkfire has helped us measure the ROI of activations since the very beginning. We are really proud to work closely with their development team and to offer our partners leading-edge measuring methods.
Lisardo Morán
COO & Head of Sponsorship, Vodafone Giants
