On 24 May Stella Artois launched a campaign promoting its sponsorship of the 1 June virtual chess challenge with grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura which is being streamed live on Twitch and will attempt the chess.com record for most unique games won in one hour.
The AB InBev beer brand is hosting the online ‘Bullet Chess Speed Run’ tournament in which players will each have one minute to play out a full game and participation is incentivised through Stella branded prize giveaway.
Tournament host Stella Artois seeks to leverage the ‘chess trend’ by launching a marketing effort designed to appeal to chess fans and players alike.
The first phase of the campaign, which is led by social and PR, aims to drive sign-ups by players who want to compete against Nakamura and the content seeks to drive them to sign up via Stella Artois’s chess website page.
The chance to take on a chess Grandmaster is so close you can taste it. Sign up to go head-to-head with @GMHikaru as he attempts to break the @chesscom record for most bullet chess speedrun wins on 6/1. #CheersMate
— Stella Artois (@StellaArtois) May 19, 2021
The beer brand is rewarding limited-edition Stella Artois chess boards and chalices to participants and to spectators who comment in the Twitch chat and after the tournament the brand will release the collection for purchase on ShopBeerGear.com, Anheuser-Busch‘s e-commerce site for merchandise.
The games will all be streamed on Nakamura’s Twitch channel and this element of the initiative is part of Stella’s umbrella strategy of appealing to younger, premium consumers.
Comment:
This unlikely partnership sees Stella leverage the surge in popularity of the sport driven both by lockdown (with so many people around the world spending more time at home with more time on their hands to pursue new pastimes and sports) and the incredible success of Netflix’s chess show ‘The Queens Gambit’ which modernised the game through a blend of fashion, style and drama and broke viewing records as well as scooping up several awards.
This has seen chess become something of a phenomenon in recent months and online platform Chess.com experienced its largest annual growth since it launched back in 2007.
Combining this with the rapid acceleration of the gaming-led Twitch platform – which in Q1 2021 accounted for 72% of all video game watching hours – sees Stella chase a premium, young adult demographic.
The beer brand’s partnership with Nakamura, the second-ranked chess player in the world, is not only bases on his ranking but also on is online influencer status as he boasts 1.2m Twitch followers and his seen by many as the player who has done most to popularise chess streaming.
Plus, by creating a branded chess merchandise collection on ShopBeerGear.com, Stella Artois can further leverage the digital marketing campaign to drive fans to its site where it can built first party customer data (an increasingly important mechanic as the likes of Apple and Google start to place further limits on such data collection).
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