A new PR campaign has been launched for League of Legends. Normally rather inconspicuous LoL pros like “Doublelift” are now being made into pop stars with their own music videos.
The problem is: League of Legends is an incredibly popular eSport, especially in South Korea and China. Recently, someone said about the “Worlds” that it was like the Asian Super Bowl.
Such events need their heroes, need stories for fans to follow: Idols are required.
However, the top players in League of Legends do not exactly look like global mega-stars like Cristiano Ronaldo or LeBron James. Most of them are very young, between 18 and 25, and appear rather real sober and shy. They do not seek the spotlight.
With a new advertising campaign, Riot Games is now trying to tell the heroic story behind their athletes.
This is the new campaign: The new ad campaign from Riot Games is the video series “It’s On.” Here, top LoL players’ stories are told in an animated video clip.
It starts with the video “Unstoppable.” Here you can see how ADC Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng went from couch potato to LoL pro. He is 25 and, for LoL standards, a veteran.
Here you can see how “the real” Doublelift reacts to this experience:
He says the graphics look great. Especially his hairstyle over the years has been perfectly captured.
As a fantasy story, he just finds it “sick” and cool. He would say that even if he weren’t in it. Now he can hardly wait to see how the community reacts.
The community apparently likes the video. It has already received over 40,000 likes and less than 1,000 dislikes from 700,000 views.
28 million view spectacularly staged LoL video
This is how Riot Games stages the LoL Worlds 2018: The staging becomes even more intense with the “official music video” for the Worlds in League of Legends: these are the LoL World Championships where the best clubs from around the world compete against each other.
Here, the “hero’s journey” of last year’s winner Kang “Ambition” Cang-yong with his team Samsung Galaxy is summarized in poetic images.
The mountain climb depicted corresponds to the path the team took and won in 2017. We explained the mystical video in this post about LoL.
The video for LoL Worlds has over 28 million views on YouTube. One can say: The strategy of League of Legends seems to be working.
At the end of the video, the previously defeated star player “Uzi” awakens. He and his team RNG are considered favorites to win the Worlds 2018 in League of Legends. In practice, the stars are not always so heroic:
