TW Steel are a modern watch maker, whose partnerships had predominantly been within Motor Racing. They approached BLAST with three overarching objectives for the partnership: to engage an entirely new and younger audience, activate their brand within this space and create a new collection of products that would leverage the BLAST community’s love for Counter-Strike and esports.
Esports is digital in its nature and the BLAST product lends itself perfectly to building online relationships and enhanced remote experiences. Non-endemic brands such as TW Steel, who rely heavily on in-person events, and showcases of their products, were unable to capitalise on this during the pandemic, which was where a unique opportunity arose; the first watch brand to break into esports.
Counter-Strike fans have big opinions and unique attitudes so it was important to develop a product line – available for players to win and for fans to buy – with these individual passion points in mind. However it was vital to not just focus on sales activity. An activation strategy was implemented around the importance of time in the game, and free to play downloadable maps (with time-based challenges) were incorporated into TW Steel timepiece designs, with player-led content filmed to drive conversation around the brand and timing itself.
The campaign resulted in a 15,000% ROI with €4.25 million generated in media value. The activation drove +156% in webshop traffic and +65% in direct sales. The PR campaigns around the launch and winners’ watches reached 24 million across 69 press stories.
