Esports sponsorship has a trust problem, and it has nothing to do with the games themselves. Brands have spent years pouring seven and eight figure budgets into event sponsorships, jersey deals, and streamer integrations, then waiting months for a report that arrives too late to act on.
Benedikt Becker, VP of Marketing at Shikenso Analytics, has spent his career inside that gap, and his perspective on sponsorship measurement is one of the clearest signals yet of where brand partnerships in gaming are heading.
Becker leads growth marketing at Shikenso, a German sponsorship analytics company headquartered in Frankfurt, working fully remotely from Bangkok. That distance is not incidental. Becker built his career across Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, starting with a five person marketing agency in Hanoi that he helped scale to 38 people. A decade spent moving through Southeast Asia's marketing landscape means he understands something most Western brand strategists miss: gaming sponsorship does not travel in one direction. It has to be built region by region, language by language.
What Shikenso Actually Does
Shikenso started eight years ago as an esports event calendar, not an analytics company. The pivot came from listening to brands at industry events who kept asking the same question: how do we know a multi-million-dollar sponsorship is actually working? That question became the company.
Shikenso's technology now tracks sponsorships across three layers. Visible exposure uses AI logo detection to scan streams and measure not just how often a brand appears, but where. Front and center on a caster desk reads differently than a logo buried on an interview back wall. Audible tracking captures the moment a caster or creator says a brand name out loud. Legible tracking scans hashtags, chat, and on-screen text across Twitch, YouTube Live, and TikTok Live, which lets Shikenso read live audience sentiment as it happens rather than reconstructing it after the fact.
All of that feeds into a media value calculation, the same logic used to compare a sponsorship against a paid Facebook or Twitch ad buy. Traditional sports sponsorships typically return a three to five times multiple on spend. Esports, according to Becker, regularly hits six, eight, or ten times. That gap is the entire argument for taking gaming sponsorship seriously as a media channel, not a novelty line item.
Why It Matters
Becker's real insight is not the technology. It is what he says the technology protects: brand equity, and specifically what he calls mental availability. Awareness gets a product noticed once. Mental availability is what gets built through a long-term, natural presence on a stream, so that when a Gen Z consumer stands in front of a 7-Eleven fridge, the brand they reach for is the one they have seen consistently, not the one that ran a single flashy campaign.
This is why Becker is blunt about the three things brands get wrong. First, audience match. Radio and television simply do not reach the audiences that live inside Netflix, live streams, and mobile games, so brands still buying against those old channels are buying reach that does not exist for their target consumer. Second, authenticity. Esports communities are hyper-critical, and a campaign that copies traditional sports marketing without adapting to gaming's internal language gets rejected fast and publicly. Third, and most pointed, measurement cannot be a finish line exercise. Becker insists brands set KPIs during the budgeting phase, using historical data, rather than discovering after the campaign ends that the report does not match what leadership expected.
The regional case studies back this up. When Shikenso worked with Moonton Games during the M6 and M7 Mobile Legends: Bang Bang World Championships in Jakarta, the challenge was not measurement in the abstract. It was isolating individual sponsor assets, jersey logos, product placements, interview backdrops, across a broadcast localized into multiple languages and platforms simultaneously, then proving which premium sponsors actually earned the highest value. That is a Southeast Asia problem specifically. Mobile Legends is played on buses and in co-working spaces across the region, and Becker notes that regional nuance shifts even within a single country, between inside and outside Kuala Lumpur, or Bangkok. A brand that treats Southeast Asia as one market is already losing value it paid for.
The GiantX partnership shows the other side of the same discipline. The European esports organization wanted to diversify revenue by launching an educational League of Legends channel. Shikenso's data let them calibrate the size, duration, and posting cadence of sponsor integrations without saturating the content and losing the audience. Seventeen sponsor brands later, the channel had grown without sacrificing engagement, and the campaign won the European Sponsorship Association's award for Best Use of Measurement and Insight.
The Broader Shift
Becker's sharpest line is about the industry's oldest habit: the end of season, 15-page PDF report that takes three months to arrive. By the time a brand reads it, the renewal conversation is already happening, and the data cannot inform it. Shikenso's answer is granular, live dashboards, weekly and monthly, down to individual screenshots and millisecond level valuation.
The example Becker gives is small but tells the whole story. He posted on LinkedIn that a live broadcast had an unbranded, all black interviewer microphone, a missed sponsor asset. Within days, the rights holder saw the post and corrected it, mid tournament. That is not a measurement report. That is measurement functioning as a live operating system for the sponsorship itself.
This is what real-time sponsorship intelligence looks like.
Brands entering gaming and esports are no longer being asked to guess and reconcile later. They are being asked to measure from day one, adjust mid-campaign, and treat every asset, a jersey, a mic, a camera angle, as something that can be optimized while the tournament is still live.
If you are a brand looking to integrate into gaming and esports in a way that builds relevance and long-term impact, Mana Partners helps you make lore, not noise.
Author
Seif Seoudy
We build brands that speak the language of gamers. Authentic, electrifying, unforgettable.
