This year, DHL’s partnership with ESL hit its stride. As live events returned, our first objective was clear. Direct Brand Engagement. We wanted fans to interact more deeply with DHL. For our second objective, we tackled a growing business need; to attract IT talent to DHL. This year the partnership has evolved to promote DHL, within ESL’s talent-rich audience, as a great place to work.
ESL is an ecosystem housing multiple unique games, each with its own demographic and language. This year, to drive brand engagement, we spoke individually to each audience. So, we created three unique campaigns for the three biggest ESL gaming strands; DOTA2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Mobile Gaming.
DHL Dota Adventures is a cheeky web series, that unites popular DOTA2 influencers with DHL’s mascot EffiBOT. DHL Ultimate 10 is a competition for CS:GO players combined with a homage to great moments from CS:GO history. DHL EffiBOT World Championships brings global competition to players of the EffiBOT DASH app.
ESL has 225m fans worldwide, most of them GenZ. This year, we’ve encouraged meaningful engagement between these fans and DHL, and, in a first for us, we collaborated with DHL’s HR department creating a successful recruitment tool. We exceeded our key objectives this year with 80% increase in Brand Engagement, 26% increase in positive perception of DHL as an employer and 1600 applications for job vacancies directly from ESL audiences.
Building on an already successful sponsorship, we’ve opened entirely new possibilities for the future of the partnership.
