#MarketingExcellenceAwards SG 2021 highlight: ASUS Tek's tournament dominates with 3-pronged approach

The Asia Pacific market for eSports is extremely diverse and fragmented, with gamers playing a wide range of games and watching a variety of gaming content. With the pandemic, there was an uptick in eSports viewership and an increase in gamers looking to kill time by taking part in various eSports tournaments. Despite the popularity of eSports tournaments worldwide, these tournaments were often carried out locally with players located at their own residences. 

Working with Zenway Productions, Asus Tek launched a fully online Asia Pacific eSports tournament, the ROG Masters Asia Pacific, to position Republic Of Gamers (ROG) as the ultimate brand of choice for gaming equipment and peripherals. The tournament was well executed and impressed the judges, winning the gold award for Excellence in eSports Marketing at MARKETING INTERACTIVE’s Marketing Excellence Awards Singapore 2021.  

Challenge

Pre-pandemic, the ROG Masters tournament finals would take place in a specific location, with teams travelling to compete. This was because eSports tournament organisers recognised the need to avoid having multi-region online tournaments due to potential latency issues such as slow network performance. 

With COVID-19-related travel restrictions, the ROG Masters could only take place fully online. However, ASUS Tek had to take into consideration ways to greatly reduce latency issues as any negative experience will reflect poorly on ROG and compromise the final result of the tournament.

Strategy

To build on the existing ROG masters branding and to maximise the reach of the tournament, ASUS Tek focused on three main strategies. 

Choosing the right game

With the gaming industry saturated with offerings, ASUS Tek understood that they had to choose a game that was relatable, had high user penetration rates and eSports following in Asia Pacific. This will ensure a higher participation rate in the tournament as well as tournament viewership. With tournament operations severely affected by the pandemic and all matches were required to be played fully online, reliable game servers were needed to handle cross-border matches during the regional finals to ensure fairness. 

The game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) was chosen for the following reasons: 

• CS:GO was the most popular First-person shooter game with 24 million monthly users
• CS:GO was the most mainstream and recognisable game title across the Asia Pacific region
• CS:GO had the most reliable cross border gaming experience

Maximising participation, exposure and outreach 

ASUS Tek knew it needed to maximise participation across Asia Pacific for maximum outreach and exposure. To achieve this, teams from every participating country (Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam) had to take part in individual country qualifiers and finals before the best teams per country could proceed to the Grand Finals of the tournament. The final cash prize of US$31,800 also attracted teams to participate in the ROG Masters. 

ASUS Tek also leveraged patriotism and support for the local teams during localised qualifying matches to create greater engagement on social media platforms. 

Building on current ROG branding 

A new theme was created for the ROG Masters and fully customizable in-game broadcast assets were utilised for the online tournament.  ASUS Tek also drove traffic to the ROG Masters website with frequent tournament updates. 

Execution

With localised qualifying matches occurring across several countries, ASUS ROG knew that it had to engage not only the tournament participants but viewers and supporters as well. To do this, localised microsites, rules and player handbooks were created in seven languages to cater to the target audience in Asia Pacific. 

ASUS Tek also created localised social media images and worked with local media partners and social media influencers to write, share and post about ROG Masters to increase penetration and awareness. A partnership with Twitch, a streaming site for eSports tournaments, resulted in a front-page feature to increase viewership and exposure. ASUS Tek also arranged for localised broadcasts of matches with local talent and language commentary to attract viewers and supporters. 

All information was housed in ROGMasters.gg, where the key visuals developed for the latest ROG Masters theme were used and contained all tournament related details with regular updates on weekly tournament results. This drove a constant stream of online traffic to the site and increased exposure and awareness for ROG. 

Results

The ROG Masters Asia Pacific 2021 was a major success. The tournament attracted a total of 1,500 participants from 294 teams, making the ROG Masters Asia Pacific the most highly participated CS:GO tournament in the region. The ROG Masters Asia Pacific attracted a total of 9,531,877 views across Twitch and Facebook with an equivalent of 98 thousand hours of watched tournament content. 

ASUS Tek’s digital marketing efforts garnered a total reach of 64 million, with total engagement of 9.4 million, 175 million impressions and a million link clicks. The ROG Masters Asia Pacific 2021 was also featured in spotlight articles across more than a hundred media platforms, achieving media impressions amounting to 2.8 billion.