The new TikTok deal to watch

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Today, I’m diving into ESL FACEIT Group’s partnership with TikTok and how vertical is the place to be, as long as you’re showing up with purpose.

Plus Speed Reads of:

The more you read this newsletter, the more you’re getting to know about me (I have a niche taste in TV, mainly). The other thing that is crucial to who I am is that I’m a born and raised New Yorker. I even remember subway tokens (now I’m just ageing myself).

Which is why I absolutely adore Kareem Rahma’s SubwayTakes. It’s like being back at home without actually having to take the F train.

Suddenly, without even realising it, I became a person who actually liked watching stuff on TikTok. This comes from someone who is a film and TV critic - I adore, and champion, the cinema experience. Would I watch Mad Max: Fury Road (one of my Letterboxd top four) on my iPhone? No. Would I watch Cate Blanchett go on a rant about leaf blowers? Absolutely. 

This is how fandom starts. Through something designed with the platform and that platform’s users in mind.

And it’s that change in audiences and behaviours that makes the ESL FACEIT Group (EFG) partnership with TikTok interesting. Debuting at IEM Atlanta, ESL are launching purpose-built vertical livestreams across their esports tournaments and in doing so they’re killing two birds with one stone.

(See I told you I like movies.)

There’s a version of this deal that's boring: take the existing CS broadcast, flip it 90 degrees, push it to TikTok.

Instead, EFG approached the deal from a targeted POV. They built a dedicated vertical broadcast product from scratch with custom graphics, bespoke overlays, creator co-streaming rights, and behind-the-scenes formats designed specifically for mobile consumption. 

For EFG, TikTok is specifically about designing for a community. 

And it doesn’t cannibalise other popular platforms, like Twitch, as TikTok esports audiences don’t consume the way a Twitch subscriber does. The TikTok viewer is mobile-first, dropping in and out of streams, which is a totally different consumption pattern from someone who settles in for a full match series.

The average TikTok session lasts 10.85 minutes - opened roughly 19 times a day, in bursts, on the move. Twitch sessions run 60 to 120 minutes, stretching even longer during esports events. These aren't two versions of the same audience. They're two fundamentally different fans with different relationships to the screen.

To show up on TikTok with a traditional broadcast is to speak the wrong language.

So remember: Do you really understand the platform & format? It's the first signal of whether you understand the community you're trying to reach.

A lot of what we cover in this newsletter is about how traditional IP and brands can find ways to show up inside games and gaming platforms to reach new audiences and stay culturally relevant. We've covered Roblox brand integrations in Edition 102, how gaming IP becomes lifestyle in Edition 103, and Pokémon's moves into EDM and MLB ballparks in Edition 105.

The EFG and TikTok deal is interesting because it runs the other way. This is a gaming and esports organisation asking how do we use a media and entertainment platform to grow our fandom? How do we take our product and make it native to someone else's cultural territory? And these questions apply to more than just esports, but to anyone looking to tap into TikTok’s users.

Gaming is finding real traction on TikTok. As of February 2026, TikTok Live recorded 39% YoY growth in esports content viewership, and in March 2026, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang hit 968,000 peak concurrent viewers on the platform. These numbers are a clear rationale behind making dedicated content for the platform.

Remember: TikTok brings more than just distribution - users have their own language, consumption habits, and culture. Taking these into account helps separate an effective campaign from one that’s merely present.

Beyond the impressive live viewership numbers, there is a likely ripple effect on TikTok that is another integral part of the EFG deal.

As we covered in our deep dive on fan fluidity, when a user discovers a game because a friend shared a clip, their retention is 30–40% higher than through traditional user acquisition.

For the fan being brought in, their friends and communities are a key tool to help them discover new passion points. That builds community in an entirely different way from the traditional fan journey.

My mother, also a born and raised New Yorker, now has a soft spot for Subway Takes because I’ve sent them to her. Now, they’re part of her YouTube rotation, but they never would have reached her through the algorithm alone (which is mostly meditation videos and classic rock). 

EFG’s strategy is that purpose-built, vertical, creator-amplified coverage will accelerate that journey in a similar way. Because they've baked creator co-streaming into the deal, and are therefore further inviting the community to become part of the broadcast. 

Let’s talk vertical, because esports isn’t the only media format having a boom on TikTok. 

Issa Rae's Screen Time, a thriller microdrama built specifically for TikTok's PineDrama hub, hit nearly 75 million views in its first week, becoming the top-performing vertical series on both TikTok and PineDrama to date, per The Wrap. It held its audience through to the final episode of Act 1, with later episodes still pulling millions of views.

What pulled fans in? (according to the comments)

The comments section also became a community (one sorely lacking for TV viewers since the demise of the water-cooler moment. And X). Vertical formats, and the platforms that are built around them, are doing something broadcast hasn’t been able to in years - become a home for discussion.

Key to its success was that Screen Time wasn’t a pre-existing TV show that was resized for TikTok. Like EFG, Rae created it exclusively for the format and platform.

It has therefore cultivated a different relationship with the screen, one that is built to be intimate and shareable. And when production is designed for it from day one, as both Screen Time and EFG's streams have been, the audience can engage with it roadblock-free, leading back to that fan effect that we think is so crucial for anyone trying to cultivate a fandom. 

So as we covered in Edition 106, short-form isn't just for discovery; it can create lasting equity and loyalty, and EFG’s vertical product is clearly built on that finding.

Whilst the EFG deal brings together production infrastructure, tournament rights, and the platform relationship (which takes time), the underlying logic of the deal is available and applicable to everyone.

And so when you’re building out a strategy, it’s important to consider which platforms your current fans are sharing content on, and then figure out if you’re making things designed to live there, or adapting something built for somewhere else.

In Edition 105, we wrote that entertainment brands grow from subcultures outward. Esports has always been a subculture - but now, what it’s doing is making its content native to the environments where fans spend their time.

So I leave you with a question, which should be bigger than "how do we get our IP on more platforms?”. It’s "what does our IP look like when it's designed for this platform from day one?".

Once you find the answer to that question, you have the ingredients you need to be able to build a more nuanced strategy to grow an audience on that platform.

Genius Sports and MediaScience new report shows that the emotional state of a viewer immediately before an ad is shown has a significant impact on how well they remember the brand.

Why you should care

Anyone who has watched a game knows that a near-miss or a momentum shift puts you in a heightened state of attention. Now there’s even more evidence that this emotional window has a measurable, significant impact on memory encoding - which we covered last week, too.

For rights holders, there’s an interesting commercial question at the heart of this data. If peak-moment inventory demonstrably outperforms standard ad breaks on recall, the case for tiered pricing, where placement around high-intensity moments commands a premium, becomes much harder to ignore.

The brands buying that inventory will eventually figure this out and start asking for it. The rights holders who get ahead of that conversation and build the necessary data infrastructure to identify, sell and deliver those moments will be in a stronger negotiating position than those still selling undifferentiated reach and impressions.

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That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!