EPTI’m sure I’ll violate a few NDAs along the way, but I don’t think anyone will mind.
At the time of our story, Josh was leading HP Omen’s marketing efforts and had just inked one of the biggest sponsorship deals in esports history with the sweetheart client of the world, The Overwatch League.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/02/overwatch-league-gets-big-sponsors-with-hp-and-intel/
Before Josh and I worked together in New York, we took a few meetings during my time at Red Bull - a job I held for a little over 4 years and where I got to work on some incredible projects during the formative years of what I’m going to call modern esports.
One of the biggest and most important projects I got to work on at Red Bull was our sponsorship pitch to The Overwatch League. We had put together an amazing proposal. We were going to print Overwatch characters on like 100 million cans of Red Bull and distribute them globally. You would only be able to unlock the Zarya can if you found it in Russia where it would be exclusively sold. Same for Pharah and Egypt or Lucio in Brazil, or any number of the other characters around the world. And if you somehow collected them all you would get an unbelievable in-game reward and Red Bull experience. We were going to host global Overwatch Tournaments and run amateur events all around the world.
It was going to be an incredible investment from Red Bull and we were prepared to PAY the Overwatch League $2 million for that privilege.
![[image loading]](https://insidefmcg.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Redbull-Streetfighter.jpg)
We took the deal really far, and a lot of great people at Blizzard really stuck their necks out to make it happen, but it ultimately fell through.
Anyway, Josh and I had that in common. We had both really worked hard to make a great pitch to the Overwatch League.
And at the time of our story, my awesome team in New York is getting to work on planning one of the coolest projects I’ve ever been a part of, during a really cool time in esports and on the eve of the Overwatch League Grand Finals.
https://archive.esportsobserver.com/nyxl-homecoming/
Getting that event to happen was a feat of incredible strength. At the core of it, you had a small and passionate team of people who really believed we could build a meaningful, sustainable, generational esports business in New York City. But the mindset of our management team was that anything we did, had to be strictly justified on its basis of making money. We’re building a business.
In other words, if we didn’t give our owners and investors a reason this wasn’t just a frugal spend, they weren’t going to do it.
And for anyone who knows anything about planning events in New York, it takes months of hard work and oftentimes lots of money to do anything like what we built - a dope party celebrating our beloved team coming home to New York for the first time. They were heartbroken after being upset in the playoffs, but the week they’d have in New York would be uplifting, and a powerful argument for how awesome esports localization can be.
![[image loading]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjJPESZXsAAyONc.jpg)
So when we set out on the journey to create the NYXL Homecoming, we did it on the assumption that we would surely be able to raise $100k-$150k in sponsorship money to cover, or at least offset the cost of the event. Fast forward the months of planning and down payments required to run any event, and we’ve closed zero dollars in sponsorship sales.
The sponsorship landscape was extremely difficult. Every big sponsor in esports was either already involved with Overwatch League, or if they wanted to be, had no real reason or obligation to partner with a team instead of the league. Once you’re on Overwatch League, you really don’t need to be on anything else to be seen in Overwatch - and you’re not really going to be seen anywhere else.
We would eventually close other deals with other amazing sponsors but, it was Josh’s deal that actually allowed the event to happen.
A boardroom of a professional Overwatch League team can be an amazing place, and also a very intense, calculating, or even political place. You’re sitting around a table with billionaires. Everything you say in that room matters.
And these guys ask very simple questions: How much will it cost? Why are we doing it?
And sometimes the feedback they give goes from being very simple - “It’s going to be hot, make sure the air conditioning works”, down to the very ridiculous - “we should dress up cosplayers and have them pick up trash around the city and call it the local heroes series”.
Honestly, brilliant idea Scott Wilpon, we absolutely should have done that, it would have been awesome.
I say this to try and set the stage for the meeting when I sat in a room with Scott and other members of the board and realized the extreme pressure, expectation, and scrutiny that this event would create AT LEAST $100k in sponsorship revenue. This is the sweetheart team of the biggest story in esports and it's the first time they’ll ever be in New York City for the first time. Someone has to want to sponsor this.
But the reality was, a lot of sponsors weren’t in a position to spend more on Overwatch during that time. And in the board room, we were having a very real conversation around “do we need to cancel this event?” because we weren’t sure if we were prepared to have a $150k red row in our spreadsheet.
Enter Josh K. Josh, who I sat across from in a couple of cool Red Bull meetings who knew how hard we worked to close Overwatch and who saw all the other dope stuff we did at Red Bull.
Josh K who was under tons of pressure to justify spending another $100k on Overwatch when he’s already invested so much. And in a landscape where every other sponsor knows that sponsoring the event probably isn’t really worth more than $5k-$10k max, especially when they’re already so visible everywhere else.
And Josh comes through. He decided to write us a $100k check. He brought a local vendor, the legendary B&H Photo Video - Electronics and Camera Store in Manhattan who supplied us with like 24 of these ridiculous HP Omen Cube PCs which are incredible computers but are the absolute worst size PC to use for any event ever in the world. They look so cool but moving them, setting them up, staging them, shooting them, making sure they’re not in the way of everything else - they’re difficult. It’s not a pc that does well in rows on a table.
![[image loading]](https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/bc43d02f96b0354a9993e58094eec34ca2c987a1/hub/2016/08/16/3b8888ac-5723-44d5-b7bf-d6572ecd1193/hp-omen-x-desktop-11.jpg?auto=webp&width=1092)
But they looked amazing in the room, they ran great and it was a real treat for our local fans to come play on them in a Free For All tournament against our pro players during the party.
https://twitter.com/jetset_/status/1022967053328805888/photo/1
The event was awesome. People lined up, celebrated our team and our local community, and had a great time. The air conditioner did, in fact, break, but the fans, the games, the music, and the vibes were all, in the end, awesome.
And in the end it did end up being a red row on our spreadsheet. But it wouldn’t have happened without awesome marketers like Josh sticking their necks out to do cool things in esports.
Anyway. That’s why I bought an HP Omen PC.
It still runs great and I’d recommend it to anyone that asked.
<3
