March Madness style college eSports tournament week “brought to you by ICON Blockchain” + Blockchain Developer Recruitment Workshops

Contribution Proposals New Proposal
1

:dart: Goal:
Promote ICON via digital brand partnerships and social media marketing in North America, Europe and South Korea. Create targeted marketing campaigns to raise brand recognition and recruit new participants to the ICON ecosystem. Link to Notion Proposal.

Current progress:
TL;DR: We are working with one of the biggest eSports leagues in the world Gen.G to make a March Madness style college eSports tournament week “brought to you by ICON Blockchain” + development recruitment workshops. We need your votes to make it happen!

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If you haven’t heard of us, we are ICXPromotions, a P-Rep focused on sponsorship, data-driven marketing. Our initial hypothesis was that eSports would be a perfect sector to market in. We polled the community and you guys agreed. After many meetings, possible sponsorships and critique from the community I think we have identified our perfect initial sponsorship.

Gen.G is a professional esports organization with headquarters in Santa Monica, Seoul, and Shanghai. Their team has been awesome working to understand our initiative and come up with an opportunity that makes sense for both of us.

To give you an idea of the process. We went to the project with several requirements:

  • eSports based event sponsorship
  • Provable metrics that target demographic would be reached
  • Constant brand association (ICON would be continually mentioned or present throughout the sponsorship)
  • Quality over quantity: our goal is to reach “tastemakers”, positively influence and have them spread positive sentiment about ICON through their network
  • Dev pool: if possible we wanted to reach people that were savvy about blockchain and could possibly develop projects and DApps on the ICON ecosystem
  • Promotion of technology/benefits not shilling the coin. Including the use of NFTs.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

  • A college eSports tournament between the Gen.G teams in a game TBD: Valorant, Overwatch, Dota2, LOL, etc.
  • An ICX based prize bool, similar to the Bitcoin prize Starcraft tournaments back in the day.
  • Event will be live-streamed on Twitch and YouTube. This link shows a previous event for Rocket League sponsored by Conoco ( removed due to confidentiality agreements ).
  • Potential NFT giveaway or auction of highlights from tournament, sponsored by ICON blockchain.
  • On campus activations at every college participating throughout the week of the tournament with ICON branding.
  • Workshops about ICON blockchain to Computer Science / Video Game / Blockchain Clubs for all participating colleges.

I am really excited about this one because it is a perfect blend of digital and physical brand marketing PERFECTLY in our demographic market and has the dual benefit of involving students who study computer science and video games. This means it could serve not only as promotion to gamers but also to developers who could build things on the ICON blockchain.

E-Sports: E-Sports is a rapidly growing market where 77% of fans are male and 61% are millennials (Nielsen). 64% of followers on Twitch purchase products recommended to them by streamers (Twitch). There is significant crossover between the cryptocurrency and E-Sports communities, with many of the major movers and shakers being involved with both. For example, Chamath Palihapitiya is part owner of the League of Legends team the Golden Guardians and a major crypto/financial bull. By associating with the Guardians, we create a positive feedback loop of interest and brand identity.

Operations:

  1. Complete transparency to community in regards to sponsorship deals and results.
  2. Budget: $25K USD
  3. Administrative Fee: $2000.
  4. Community based input for to determine campaign targets and effectiveness.

Who We Are
Without doxing myself, I am an entrepreneur and scientist with degrees from NYU and Columbia. My partner is a fellow NYU alumn and an engineer at Fortune 500 software/design company. I have 5+ years experience in business, emerging technologies and branding/marketing.

Thank You

We look forward to your feedback and input!

2

Can you elaborate on how ICON would be presented in the context of a brand partnership? Would they be diving into the technology, or would it be a situation where they just mention ICX from an investment perspective?

This part worries me a little:

This means we can promote ICON to communities that are likely to be interested and like to support content creators by purchasing the products they promote.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding it, but this suggests content creators buy ICX, pitch it to their audience, and then we hope the audience buys it as well?

I love the NFT section though. If the brand partnerships could involve special limited edition NFTs for their audiences, I’d be in full support of that. If the partnership involves general promotion of the ICX token only, I would not be in support of that.

Lastly, you mentioned this as a strategy to recruit new developers into ICON. Can you elaborate on how the proposal would generate developer interest?

2 Likes
3

Good questions!

No we will never shill ICX or encourage people to buy it.

Our marketing strategy has three main goals:

  • Conversion (track and measure effectiveness)
  • Association (define the brand identity)
  • Awareness (make people familiar with the brand)

This project will primarily focus on association and awareness by communicating clear easy to understand benefits of ICON. For example, IBM does not describe how Watson works in ads. Instead, they communicate the effect Watson has on a viewer’s daily life. The way to get people to connect to complex, technical products is to show the benefits.

The initial goal of this project is to associate the ICON brand with influencers in our target demos and raise awareness about the ICON project by educating their audience about the tangible benefits of ICON. We will do this by leveraging ICON NFT technology to create one of a kind digital autographs from their favorite streamers.

Although our goal is not to shill ICX or drive sales, we will always create a “call to action”. Conversion is how we measure success and refine campaigns, helping our project be efficient and optimized.The key thing to recognize is that there are different types of goals in marketing. Advertisement can be about conversion (driving sales), association (defining the brand identity) and awareness (getting people familiar with the ICON name).

1 Like
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Crossposted to /r/helloicon. Getting positive feedback!

Also, a major component of our project is creating NFT assets for these streamers to giveaway as part of the sponsorships. If anyone has experience with making ICON based NFT assets, please reach out!

6

The general idea is great and it’s the marketing I prefer. My issues come from my experience as someone who worked in the E-Sport industry for a while. I can’t link ICX with the E-Sport in any tangible way. Sharing NFT assets good idea but you need a platform for that.

7

Thanks!

And it’s a valid point, but you could say the same about Barclays advertising at Premiere League game. We think NFT is a good start, but are taking a bunch of suggestions from the community right now.

One idea from the reddit thread:

With the upcoming release of the Dota Netflix series (animated by a Korean studio), are you planning on sponsoring a Dota 2 tournament (one of the biggest esports in the world)?

How about Starcraft? I remember Starcraft tournaments with Bitcoin prizes

8

The Premier League biggest football league. Football is a global sport with most fans so that’s significantly different than E-Sport. Since that’s about brand awareness at the start. E-Sport also have highest revenue per fan but still my point stands. There are strong points and weak points of E-Sport and considering numbers I don’t think it’s enough for brand awareness. Outside that I can’t see a way of linking icx not to mention your proposal is about brand awareness.

9

Great to hear from someone in E-Sports! Most of my friends in that world are more on the player management side. I’ve seen personally from them that sponsorship marketing can be highly effective, but yes it’s definitely not mainstream yet.

However, we think that the goal isn’t to appeal to the widest range, it’s raise awareness in our target demographic: internet savvy 25-45 year old males.

According to Nielsen 77% of e-sports fans are male, 61% are millennials and 64% of purchase products recommended to them by streamers. We can then further hyper-target sponsorships using individual streamers audience and engagement metrics.

Obviously, we’d love to do premiere league sponsorships but that costs millions of dollars. This strategy allows us to spend less to reach the people most likely to respond well. Of course, we are open to alternative suggestions too. Do you have any other ideas on how we could spread awareness?

10

We think ICON needs to do lot of Marketing activities in the whole globe. So, it is good to have such activities.

This proposal needs lot more work to formalize it. I assume this is just an idea you are sharing at this time.

11

Hi,

We have been hard at work negotiating with potential sponsorships and have narrowed it down to one. Please see the revised proposal edit above.