Most brands know where their audience spends time. Far fewer know why they belong there. That gap, between presence and purpose, is the subject of episode two of Culture Pulse, where Mana Partners' Seif sat down with Fernando Loureiro, founder of Galo and director of brand partnerships at SPOTV, to unpack what actually earns a brand a seat in gaming and esports culture.
Fernando's perspective comes from having worked every side of the industry. Agency, rights holder, brand, and broadcast, across Brazil, New York, and Singapore. That range shows in how he talks about partnerships. He is not describing gaming marketing from the outside. He has bought the rights, sold the rights, translated the objectives, and amplified the content, often within the same career, sometimes within the same year.
The Real Filter Brands Should Be Using
The conversation centers on a blueprint most brands skip entirely. Before entering any gaming or esports space, Fernando argues a brand needs to clear at least one of three bars: authenticity, a genuine pain point it can solve, or an experience it can meaningfully improve.
That is not it.
Fernando is direct about what happens when none of those apply. If a brand's only reason for showing up is that its audience is there, it does not need a cultural strategy. It needs media. And media, bought without a role to play, gets ignored by exactly the audience it was meant to reach.
This distinction matters because it reframes how budget conversations should happen. Rights fees get a brand into the room. They do not earn a brand a place in the culture. Fernando points to the industry's activation ratio as proof: for every dollar spent securing IP or sponsorship rights, brands should be spending one to two dollars actually activating it. The global average sits at 81 cents of activation per dollar of rights. That gap is where partnerships go to become forgettable.
What Getting It Right Actually Looks Like
The examples Fernando brings up are not the obvious ones. DHL, a logistics brand with no natural claim to esports culture, found its pain point at ESL: fragile tournament equipment that needed specialized handling between arenas. By solving that and gamifying it for fans, DHL earned something logistics brands rarely get, crowds chanting the brand's name from the stands.
Chipotle went even narrower. Working with the fighting game community, the brand used the promo code EWGF623, gibberish to anyone outside the community and instantly recognizable to hardcore players as the numpad notation for the Electric Wind God Fist move. That is what it looks like to speak a game's internal language rather than translate it.
Heineken's move in Korea solved a scheduling problem, not a marketing one. UEFA Champions League matches air in the middle of the Korean night, after bars have legally closed. Heineken turned 24-hour laundromats into overnight viewing party hubs, stepping in as an enabler for an experience fans wanted but had no legal way to access.
None of these are the biggest budgets in gaming marketing. They are the sharpest reads of what a community actually needed.
Where the Industry Is Still Leaving Value on the Table
Fernando also names two gaps most brands have not caught up to yet. The first is what he calls the in-between moments. Brands over-index on marquee events, game day, race day, the big launch, then go quiet until the next one. Fandom does not work that way. It is an always-on part of how fans build identity, and the brands that only show up for the spectacle miss the parts of fandom that actually build loyalty.
The second is women's sports in APAC. Global investment and fandom in women's sports has grown sharply, but the region is lagging behind the rest of the world. For brands willing to move first, that lag is not a red flag. It is whitespace.
A brand's role in a gaming or cultural space is not something to assume. It is something to earn, deliberately, before spending a dollar on rights.
If you are a brand or publisher 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.
