Thousands of gamers crowded into NEPI Rockcastle shopping centres across Romania over five weekends in June and July to watch local influencers compete in the ‘Esports Kings’ tournament.
Competitors played CounterStrike:GO and League of Legends, two of the most popular e-sports games globally. Both games have a combined userbase of around 500,000 players in Romania, mostly among the Gen-Z age group, which attracted major consumer brands as sponsors of the NEPI Rockcastle event to reach this key, but difficult to access, demographic through traditional marketing channels. A study conducted by the Romanian Game Developers Association in November 2022, indicated that there are 7.8 million players of electronic games in Romania.
Roxana Baias, Group Head of Marketing at NEPI Rockcastle, said: “The success of our Esports Kings Tournament in the size of the crowds, and the marketing impact for the sponsoring consumer brands and partner retailers, dramatically exceeded our most optimistic expectations. Thousands of people turned up our shopping centres to see some of the leading Gen Z gaming influencers. They have combined followings of a couple million followers in Romania across all channels and this helped to greatly magnify the marketing around the event through the ‘digital halo’ effect of social media and by word-of-mouth. We call this ‘Fifth Channel Marketing,’ or the physical/digital hybrid mix going beyond the four channels of text, radio, television and digital, and engaging with the hard-to-reach Gen Z market to promote services and products. They are a key target for our product partners and retailer brands, as this age demographic will form the largest component of future consumer markets and already strongly influences the spending focus of their households.”
NEPI Rockcastle is the largest owner and operator of shopping centres by value in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, where economic growth, and fast-growing household purchasing power and retail sales, are strongly outpacing Western European countries even against a background of high inflation.
