Oliver is 37 years old and an online marketing professional from Düsseldorf, Germany. His experiences include 3 years as head of online marketing for conference organizer EUROFORUM. The Competitive Gaming Conference is his brainchild and his idea is to connect E sports with leading global businesses. His marketing skills combined with the impressive business network of EUROFORUM can form a valuable asset to the E sports community.

Why do we need an eSports business conference?

E sports is a phenomenon of the masses. Millions of gamers play and watch games online. Some countries are setting the diplomatic status of gamers equal to athletes. Professional leagues organize an ever growing business. Gaming gets serious and no one should ignore this trend.

E sports is a sponsoring-driven market. Endemic brands like Intel discovered this potential very early and while more and more non-endemic brands like Coca Cola enter as partners, competitive gaming is not widely known amongst marketing officials in corporations yet. 

Our brand EUROFORUM enjoys a good standing with high ranking decision makers of all industries. We are able to raise awareness to the possibilities of E sports amongst a target group that is hard to reach otherwise. Because we think we can help to raise E sports on another level and make it a widely known business topic, we started to plan the Competitive Gaming Conference CGC Europe.

Made from a business perspective

CGC Europe will be a conference targeting three different groups of delegates: the E sports industry, marketing executives of vendors and the advertising agencies. The goal of CGC Europe is to establish E sports as a topic of interest in marketing and brand management departments within consumer brand companies. We invite those experts to learn about the possibilities of E sports, to network and to create new strategies to approach their target group of young adults.

Organized by EUROFORUM, CGC will be the first E sports conference created from a neutral, non-gaming perspective. We will leverage the good standing of our brand EUROFORUM to provide a top-class business event that will help the young E sports industry to grow and to open up the infrastructure of competitive gaming to brands that are looking for innovative new ways of marketing.

Conference format

The conference will be divided into different panels, each focusing on a different topic relevant to E sports and marketing. Each panel will be opened by one or two short keynote speeches. After the introduction, up to five invited participants can freely discuss the subject from different perspectives. Questions and input from the audience are welcome and a wildcard-seat on the stage will be provided to invite delegates with interesting opinions or remarks on the topics. The whole event will be hosted by two presenters - one from the world of E sports and one from the business side. They will help the participants of the panels to focus and to interact with the audience.

Networking area

We will provide an infrastructure for delegates to meet in a private environment separately to have face to face talks with potential partners. The whole set-up of this networking area is already successfully tested in different industries by EUROFORUM and provides an effective way to grow new business. This will extend the benefit of the conference to the delegate.

Live-Streaming and On-Demand

All the panels will be live-streamed in cooperation with a partner. After the event, the content will be available as on-demand videos on our channels.

Consumer modules

Following our slogan “Claim Your Future in E sports Now!”, we will add a number of consumer modules to the event that will interlock with the NGC. Those modules will focus on consulting young adults regarding personal careers, starting an own business or becoming a pro-gamer themselves. Additionally we will provide a platform for all the enthusiastic initiatives developing in E sports to present themselves to the audience of gamers and the delegates of the business conference. All consumer modules will be present for the duration of both events: beginning with the CGC and ending on the last day of NGC. 

The Coaching Area

This area will offer coaching to interested gamers in three different aspects: career-coaching, start-up coaching and game coaching. 

• Education experts will help the young adults to discover the various job-opportunities growing from the E sports-industry. Besides pro-gamers and casters, a number of other functions are needed: media-professionals, broadcasting-technicians or web-designers are just examples. 
• Business consultants and tax-experts will provide some coaching for people interested in turning their hobby into a business, explaining what it means to start your own company and what pitfalls a founder should avoid.
• Last but not least a lot of young people ask themselves, how to become a pro-gamer. Some well-known E sports professionals will give them an idea on how to pursue a career in E sports. 

The Barcamp

Located in one of the main catering areas of the event location, a stage will provide an opportunity for small initiatives, fan-based organizations, young clans or visionary entrepreneurs to present their ideas to the audience. Streamed live and offered as video on-demand later, each presenter can distribute the content via own channels. This helps to integrate the many ambitious projects in the E sports community into the whole concept of the event and adds an important part to the message of CGC: that we actually care about the E sports scene.

When and where?

We will announce the date and venue for our event and some specials in the making in January 2015. So stay tuned and find out more about the planned conference.

Oliver Fedtke