Activision's Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Esports Leagues, Daniel Cherry III, is on a mission to help esports go mainstream.
Cherry was attracted to the job because of the opportunity to get the company's major esports leagues — Call of Duty as well as the Overwatch League — seen by as many people in as many places as possible. And he bought into CEO Bobby Kotick's vision, he said.
", you continuously have ambitious people, not really thinking about others but only themselves. And this was not actually that conversation, this conversation was 'our fans deserve this.' ... So my remit, candidly, was to deliver the promise to the fans at the scale scope and quality. We have a saying ... Blizzard quality, and it's not a euphemism. It literally is, good enough is not good enough.
That ambition is demonstrated by the pace at which the Overwatch franchise was developed. It was launched in 2016 and now has 20 city-based international teams, with new franchisesCherry wants sponsors to help it build the brand, just as Sprite did for the NBA and its Slam Dunk contest. He mentions the catchphrase "Be Like Mike," introduced in a 1992 commercial celebrating Michael Jordan. "That didn't come from the NBA, that didn't come from Nike, that came from Gatorade.
The demographics for Overwatch skew younger than traditional sports, with a median age of 24 to 26, which represents an opportunity for new fan "rituals, that will keep people interested," Cherry said. His aim is to make esports "forever sports," he said. "In America, you had a time where a horse race was the top sport in the country, then it was boxing, then it was baseball. And yes you have a fan base that grows with them but it evolved over time.
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