We work with some of the world’s best game publishers and brands to elevate their properties into amazing esports experiences - having delivered tournaments, content and shows in a variety of games, including: Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six Siege, DOTA 2, VALORANT, Apex Legends, FIFA 2022 and Fortnite.

Netflix came to us with a key objective to drive brand awareness, interest and viewership of their upcoming series Copenhagen Cowboy within the Counter-Strike core audience base of 18-34 year olds. This audience is notoriously a hard-to-reach digitally native online community who are traditionally in the “skip-ad” space. We needed to come up with a creative idea to hook them quickly and to keep them interested and actively participating during our campaign window, which ran daily for a week during the highly-anticipated BLAST Fall Final in November 2022.

To promote the upcoming Netflix show “Copenhagen Cowboy” in an original

and appealing way to the very advertising savvy gaming audience who despises traditional AD breaks and in general anything that disturbs their gaming experience, we created a digital quest that was seamlessly integrated into one of the biggest CS:GO LAN events of the year and had the audience deeply involved, and not just looking from afar.

The quest, a gamified experience of Copenhagen Cowboy, took the audience through Copenhagen Cowboy promotional material in a fun and engaging way through video, static visuals, websites and live broadcast. We validated the activation towards the audience by having some of the biggests stars within CS:GO taking part, while also featuring the creator of Copenhagen Cowboy, Nicolas Winding Refn and video game legend Hideo Kojima, speaking directly to the audience and the CS:GO fans.

The ideation and the strategy went hand-in-hand. We know that the esports audience doesn’t value advertising that disrupts their viewing experience so whatever the idea was, it had to feel additive to that user journey online. We didn’t want the experience to feel passive, but rather enhance the experience in the arena for the live audiences.

Light Up The Dragon was intended to elevate and entertain as well as inform the audience about Copenhagen Cowboy through creating a tough challenge that the audience would be hungry to solve. We know that there are many comparable elements in both the campaign we created and the game they know and love.

Key to driving the campaign forward was getting familiar faces to front the challenge and help deliver the message. We did this via a number of famous faces from both the Netflix series and the world of esports.

The key objective was to drive brand awareness and viewership of Copenhagen Cowboy within the BLAST core audience of 18-34 year olds, while engaging and reaching both the in-arena fans and those watching remotely on the global broadcast all around the world. Besides the below campaign numbers, we successfully connected with thousands of people in the middle of a busy CS:GO event, creating a campaign and entertaining experience for the fans that had them asking for more, while having Copenhagen Cowboy at the center of it all.

Results:

Impressions: +583m

Media value: +€726.000

Engagements: +109.000

Likes: +104.000

Digital audience: Fans tuning in and watching the campaign from 150+ territories and in 29 languages with 14.8 million total global views on BLAST-owned channels

In-person attendance: 12,000 fans in attendance across the audience days