2023 started off with a bang as Microsoft announced a brand new partnership with Riot Games, allowing Xbox Game Pass owners to get premium content on every title of the franchise, League of Legends above all. As MGNT, our mission was to send this message to the Riot community and to do that we planned a cross-media campaign including a wide set of innovative and creative branded experiences.

The campaign revolved about the main League of Legends amateur event in Italy: the Baolo Championship Series (aka BCS), a tournament starring more than 40 streamers, gamers and content creators live on Paolo Cannone’s Twitch channel. We designed an amplification strategy that encouraged active participation from the viewers and quickly became a distinctive element of the competition.

We designed two Game Pass branded overlays that gave the viewers the power to have a direct impact on their favourite team’s matches: “the ban protection”. The mechanics was simple and fun: before every match the public could start this special by spamming the “!gamepass” command in the chat. Once the protection was on, they had a few seconds to type the League of Legends role set to be banned from the draft phase of the next team.

Every phase of the experience, from voting to the announcement of the “winner”, was shown through branded and unique animations. The community showed incredible commitment and match by match tried to help their favourite streamers and benefit from the ban. To ensure a broaded amplification to the brand, every livestream also included a specific chatbot redirecting to the campaign, logo rotation and dedicated banners and the whole event was also communicated through Qlash and Paolo Cannone Instagram and Twitter channels.

The great finale took place both live on Twitch and IRL at the H-Farm venue of Roncade (Treviso) in front of more than 600 people. Throughout the event both online and offline fans had the chance to get special Game Pass codes worth a one-year subscription.