AT&T has closed its first esports team sponsorship, coming to terms with Cloud9 on a deal that includes presenting rights to “The Nines,” a new weekly digital video series about the organization’s 12 teams in 10 games.
The Nines’s holistic approach to the entire Cloud9 organization will be a shift in content strategy, which to this point mostly focuses on particular teams. The new format will facilitate crossover fandom from one game to other Cloud9 teams, executives hope, and also allow AT&T to market to an aggregated fan base.
Cloud9 had 17.4M social followers across its various channels.
“We don’t have a single place where you can just go find out what’s happening in the Cloud9 universe in one spot, and I think that’s what’s unique about what we’re building here,” said co-founder and CEO Jack Etienne.