AT&T Makes Content, Influencer Marketing Important Components of 100 Thieves Partnership
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
AT&T announced last week that it was joining “100 Thieves as its official 5G and fiber innovation sponsor through a multi-year organization-wide and esports team sponsorship.” This partnership demonstrates an evolution in how companies are leveraging esports partnerships to have a new focus on influencer and content marketing.
In a past post, we showed why large companies such as AT&T and Nike were pursuing esports partnerships. Then Senior Executive Vice President of Digital, Retail and Care in AT&T’s Entertainment Group Rasesh Patel said, “AT&T does extremely well with more established customers, but we’re trying to attract a younger demographic.”
The Block Six Analytics (B6A) Audience Inference Platform (AIP) demonstrates how AT&T should achieve this goal by entering into an agreement with 100 Thieves, “the premium lifestyle brand and gaming organization.” AIP uses natural language processing (NLP) to examine posts from followers of specific accounts to determine their demographic and psychographic profiles.
The results of our AIP demographic analysis are below. In particular, 100 Thieves enables AT&T to better engage with a younger, more diverse audience than the company could achieve on its own.
One of the keys to any partnership is to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message to drive a company’s specific revenue and brand goals. Message creation and delivery appears to be one way that AT&T and 100 Thieves have evolved from the more “traditional” approach to esports partnership.
More specifically, AT&T and 100 Thieves have placed significant emphasis on influencer and content marketing as opposed to primarily focusing on competitions. AT&T specifically calls this component out in its release about the partnership. “Headlined by accomplished and culture-shaping creators Valkyrae, Nadeshot, BrookeAB, Hiko, Yassuo and others, 100 Thieves will work with AT&T to deliver original gaming content and live events highlighting 5G and AT&T Fiber.”
Leveraging “creators” and content in this manner makes sense particularly given AT&T’s focus on 5G and fiber. Our AIP psychographic of the 100thieves account demonstrates that this audience disproportionately uses keywords that focus on gaming, streaming, and technology.
The word cloud above highlights the 100 most important keywords to the 100thieves followers. Keywords such as “broadcast, stream, streamer, and monitor” are emphasized along with words such as “roblox, valorant, playstation, faze, controller, and console.” This demonstrates that content featuring gaming (both inside and outside of competition) and technology should resonate with this audience.
Our past posts show the importance of influencer marketing as part of a content marketing strategy. More specifically, our Influencer Analysis Platform (IAP) consistently finds that athletes organically talking about topics of interest to an audience frequently generate the highest levels of engagement, sentiment, and value in social media posts.
100 Thieves and AT&T seem to clearly understand this and have made it an important component of the partnership. That is one reason that AT&T has highlighted 100 Thieves “creators” and “gaming content” in its release.
AIP demonstrates some key reasons why AT&T wants to work with 100 Thieves. More specifically, AIP shows how 100 Thieves enables AT&T to reach a younger, more diverse audience. In addition, AIP shows how 100 Thieve enables AT&T to engage using content and influencers this audience organically talks about.
One of the frequent questions we receive from current and potential clients is how do we maximize engagement with new audiences using sports partnerships. AT&T and 100 Thieves demonstrate the importance of influencer and content marketing in achieving these goals.