Ualá, the Argentine fintech, became main sponsor of the New Pampas esports organisation in 2021. We ran the performance side of that partnership — the campaigns, and the Gaming Academy operation end to end — with one commercial objective behind the community goal: card issuance.
Registrations in the academy’s first edition
People across the esports organisation
Competitive disciplines run in parallel
Campaigns and academy operation run by the team behind 22Labs for the Ualá New Pampas partnership from 2021. Registration figures as reported by Ualá. The launch communication plan — press, event and influencer relations — was developed separately by Ualá’s in-house teams with agency Grupo Mass, and the Eikon award for that plan belongs to them.
Brand partnerships in esports usually stop at visibility: a logo on a shirt, a spike in mentions, and no mechanism connecting any of it to the product. The problem is that awareness among a young gaming audience is easy to buy and almost impossible to convert without a reason for that audience to open the app.
Ualá Gaming Academy was a free monthly tournament programme for amateur players aiming to reach the professional team. Entry required two things: being over 13, and holding a Ualá card. That single requirement turned a community initiative into an acquisition funnel — every aspiring player had to become a customer first.
The demographic Ualá needed is the one least reachable through traditional media and least responsive to financial advertising. Gaming reached them on their own ground, and the academy gave them a reason to act that had nothing to do with financial products — the card was the ticket, not the pitch.
Strategy input, the paid campaigns, and the end-to-end operation of the Gaming Academy — including the funnel that made card issuance the entry requirement. The launch PR, event and influencer programme were run separately by Ualá with agency Grupo Mass.
Because it collapses two steps into one. Instead of building awareness and hoping it converts later, the action a player wanted to take — entering the academy — was the same action that issued a card.
The mechanism does. Any audience that is hard to reach through advertising can usually be reached through something it already wants to do, provided the product requirement is placed at the entry point rather than at the end of a funnel.
Tell us who you need to acquire and why the usual channels are not working. We reply within one business day.