The R&A, WGT By Topgolf & Mastercard Team Up To Launch Inaugural ‘The e-Open’

Timed to coincide with the weekend of the cancelled 2020 Open, The R&A has launched its inaugural ‘The e-Open Tournament Presented By Mastercard’ for online gamers.

The virtual 18-hole stroke play tournament takes place on a virtual version of the iconic Royal St George’s (the course which was to host this year’s Open), as rendered through Topgolf’s World Golf Tournament (WGT) online multiplayer virtual golf game, between 13 July and 8 September.

The initiative, which was developed in harness with R&A and Mastercard agency Octagon, aims to engage golfers, golf fans and gamers from around the world and the competition tees off with qualifying events, then proceeds to knock-out rounds and culminates with a Grand Final showdown in September.

The e-Open Format:

Qualifying Stages – 13 July to 23 August

Live Exhibition Match – 10 August

Knockout Rounds – 27 August to 30 August

Grand Final – 8 September

The e-Open will also include a live virtual exhibition match, presented by sponsor and Open patron Mastercard, also on the virtual Royal St George’s course played between pro golfers (possibly involving existing Mastercard golf ambassadors such as Justin Rose, Graham McDowell, Brooke Henderson, Annika Sorenstam perhaps paired with other endorsers or celebrities) and which will be broadcast globally.

The e-Open’s promotional campaign – which runs across The R&A’s own platforms, as well as on Mastercard and Topgolf channels – invites the world’s gamers and golfers to test themselves on the links and incentivises participation through a range of prizes from a Tom Watson signed Callaway golf bag to an all-expenses paid trip to The 149th Open at Royal St George’s in 2021.

Introducing The e-Open in partnership with @Mastercard

To find out more about the inaugural e-Open and how you can enter to compete for great prizes, please visithttps://t.co/dOCDN6SF0S

— The Open (@TheOpen) July 14, 2020

To enter players should head to theopen.com/the-eopen-2020.

For Mastercard the objective behind partnering with The e-Open, as with other eSports, is primarily to provide exclusive ‘priceless’ gaming experiences for its customers and stakeholders and secondarily to build the brand position and engagement with GenZ/Millennials.

Thus, The e-Open sits on Mastercard’s ‘Priceless’ online platform (https://www.priceless.com/golf/), as well as being activated via online/social content, a series of prizes (including inviting winners and guests to The Open next year), while it has also included in-game activation strands which offers registered customers a chance to play with a Mastercard branded virtual ball which emits the Mastercard sonic logo when struck during the game.

“We have seen eSports become hugely popular and enjoyed by gamers all around the world. The e-Open will give golf fans a unique opportunity on a global platform to challenge themselves against other gamers in a virtual tournament over Royal St George’s,” commented The R&A Chief Commercial Officer Neil Armit.

“We have been working on The e-Open for some time now and are pleased to be able to launch the inaugural tournament during what was due to be the week of the Championship this year. It will complement The Open for The Ages, which is being broadcast this Sunday as a very special celebration of the Championship.”

“We are excited to share The Open experience digitally with fans throughout the world. With new advances to our livestream capabilities, our WGT by Topgolf platform makes accessible one of the most prestigious tournaments on the same course as the pros, outfitted with first-hand challenges, rewards and nuances of Royal St George’s,” added President of Topgolf Media YuChiang Cheng.

“We are humbled to be selected by the R&A to produce the first ever official e-Open and allow anyone with a smartphone or computer to have the chance to win it.”

Agency Octagon, led by its golf and eSports teams, worked both with the R&A (helping refine and accelerate its existing eSports planning) and with long-time client Mastercard (activating the sponsorship as the brand sought out virtual, at-home experiences to replace physical, in-person experiences lost through the COVID pandemic) on the project.

Comment:

This is another stand-out example of the pandemic-driven acceleration of an existing trend and of a low latency property and partner response to the lack of a physical events and associated physical sponsorship rights.

With the rise and rise of gaming and of parallel physical/virtual sports properties, it seems likely that The e-Open will evolve into an ongoing, annual initiative rather than just be a pandemic-driven 2020 one-off.

The organisers aim for up to 100,000 players to compete in the first e-Open via WGT, which is played by more than 28 million gamers around the globe and which provides a challenge for players of all abilities.

The fit with Mastercard was further helped as the payments brand already has an existing relationship with WGT parent Topgolf in the USA.

For Mastercard, the tie-up builds on its existing relationship with the R&A through its partnerships with The Open and the Women’s Open and its other golf alliances such as its work with the PGA (as well as its other major sports partnerships with major properties such as the Australian Open, the MLB and UEFA).

It also dovetails with the payments provider’s expanding heritage in eSport spearheaded by its global partnership with Riot Games’ League Of Legends (see our 2018 case study).

This is WGT’s first partnership with The R&A, although it already has an existing relationship with the European Tour in the form of the European eTour. This tournament was unveiled back in December 2019 by the European Tour, eSports specialists DreamHack and Topgolf Entertainment Group and teed off at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship presented by EGA in January.

The inaugural, season-long eTour was designed to feature six eSports contests held at/in parallel with European Tour tournaments around the world. It sees the world’s best eSport golf gamers attempted to qualify for the live onsite events via an online tournament which will then see the top eight players compete onsite at European Tour events in a nine-hole knockout match play format. The five tournament winners, along with three wildcards qualifiers, were then meant to contest the season-ending finale at the European Tour’s own season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai at the Jumeirah Golf Estates from 19 to 22 November 2020.

Other Major golf tournaments with eSport strands include the PGA Tour’s 2K21 game, while the USGA also partnered with WGT for a ‘2020 Virtual Open sponsored by Lexus’ (https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2020/05/usga–world-golf-tour-launch-virtual-open–best-of-challenge.html). Again, this virtual tournament gave golf fans and gamers a chance to compete to win a VIP trip to the 2021 US Open at Torrey Pines and a $500 USGA Shop gift card.

The qualifying portion of the Virtual US Open took place between 4 May and 11 June on a ‘Best of the US Open’ course created from memorable holes from past championships. At the end of qualifying, the top 156 scorers moved on to compete in four rounds of championship play at Congressional, Merion, Chambers Bay and Pebble Beach, after which 10 finalists competed for the grand prize in an 18-hole playoff which was livestreamed across multiple USGA channels on 27 June.

Interestingly, the first e-Open also launches at a time when Topgolf itself is reportedly in talks to go public in a merger with the special purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp II (following a similar route to other privately held sports-related companies such as DraftKings and Allied Esports which aims to avoid current stockmarket volatility).

Topgolf currently has more than 50 venues across the USA, the UK and Australia.

Links:

The Open

https://www.theopen.com/

https://www.facebook.com/The-Open-Championship/

https://www.instagram.com/theopen

https://twitter.com/TheOpen

https://www.youtube.com/user/theopen

R&A

https://www.randa.org/

https://www.instagram.com/therandagolf/

https://www.facebook.com/randagolf/

https://mobile.twitter.com/RandA