10 October saw EA FIFA 21 eSports Team Tundra roll out a launch campaign promoting its new kit in tandem with a pair of new commercial partners in TikTok and Kappa.
Italian sportswear brand Kappa, as the team’s new technical partner and official kit supplier, produced the new apparel which all carries new shirt sponsor and principal partner TikTok’s logo front and centre.
The campaign’s kit reveal video was amplified across all three brands’ digital and social channels on 10 October.
The deal with the Italian sportswear brand spans the official competition kit for Tundra eSports and a line of Tundra apparel that ‘represent the personality and attitude of the Tundra team and players’ which includes tracksuits which are available for sale online at Wild Thang.
The new partnerships, which coincide with the release of FIFA 21, see both brands deepen their gaming and eSports presence with the London-based FIFA team which boasts 2018 FIFA eWorld Cup Champion and back-to-back Xbox Champion Musaed ‘Msdossary’ Al-Dossary, as well as elite talent from Russia, Saudi Arabia and Poland including Damian ‘Dame’ Augustyniak, Anton ‘Klenoff’ Klenov, Stepan ‘Funkbraza’ Mikhovich, and head coach Enzo Serre.
Launched in 2019, Tundra’s stated aim is to ‘build the world’s best FIFA team’ and after its rapid growth through the first 12 months, TikTok and Kappa will help lead the team’s rebrand and expansion which includes a new @TundraEsports account hosted on the Chinese-owned social media channel.
“eSports has found a natural home on TikTok, with gaming content already proving to be hugely popular in our community. Our users love to share their winning gameplays, rituals and triumphs, while also watching the best in the business go head to head in international tournaments,” commented TikTok Europe Head of Brand & Partnerships Marketing Jana Ulaite. “We can’t wait to see what team Tundra has in store for us for FIFA 21.”
UK Sales Manager of Kappa (which now has 12 eSports kit partnerships including one with Faze Clan) Dave Bandell added: “The fit was obvious given the brand’s heritage in football. Esports has become an important part of Kappa’s strategy since last year when we signed our first partnership in the sector. We grew our brand equity in the sector off the back of these recent partnerships and we are getting frequent enquiries from other eSports teams and organisations whose fans are a demographic that perfectly fits with Kappa’s core audience and target group of dynamic and young consumers looking to get most out of life.”
“FIFA has over 3.3.bn views on TikTok to date,” claims Michael Munro, co-founder of Tundra. “The appetite for esports, and particularly Fifa content is already proven, so the partnership is a natural fit and unique in that it flows from the digital through to the physical.”
Comment:
Up until recently TikTok has leveraged gaming more as entertainment than competitive eSports in line with its ‘where culture starts’ positioning (and advertiser pitch), but this is now changing.
This move reinforces the much hyped social media platform’s increasing commitment to gaming and follows TikTok’s eSports debut earlier in 2020 when it became the title partner of the US-based, multi-game TikTok Cup (on Twitch) and will build on the 3.3bn views of FIFA on TikTok to date.
For TikTok the deal is partly about mobile-centric visibility: creating a platform to demonstrate at elite level how eSports can work on TikTok. eSports sits at the cross-section of several popular genres on the social platform – gaming, sports and fitness – and thus maps well with TikTok content and its core 18 to 25-year-old audiences through providing snippets of content suited its short-form template.
Plus, FIFA’s long-lived franchise heritage makes it a more family-friendly space than many other competitive eSports games and thus suits ByteDance (TikTok’s fairly conservative-minded parent company).
Links:
Team Tundra
https://twitter.com/TundraEsports_
https://www.instagram.com/tundraesports/
https://www.facebook.com/TundraEsports
https://www.youtube.com/c/TundraEsports
https://www.twitch.tv/tundraesportstv
TikTok
Kappa
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