CASE FILE — KIA × LEC COMMUNITY TOURNAMENT
International Coordination · Grassroots Esports
How Kia moved from sponsor logo to genuine esports community supporter — with 84K unique viewers and 460 participants to show for it.
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CASE FILE: N. REMIS — LEAD INVESTIGATOR
I've Watched Campaigns Die Up Close.
This Is What I Learned.
Not a theory borrowed from a textbook. Not a framework built in a vacuum. Sixteen years of being in the room when marketing campaigns succeeded, failed, and sometimes died for reasons nobody on the team could name.
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How Kia Earned Esports Community Credibility by Giving Fans a Stage — Not a Sales Pitch
460 participants. 84K unique Twitch viewers. Finals at the LEC Studios in Berlin with Caedrel and Drakos. A forensic breakdown of how
grassroots tournament coordination turns a sponsorship into something an audience actually cares about.
Client
Kia Europe
League
LEC — League of Legends EMEA Championship
Location
Multi-country Europe (qualifiers) · LEC Studios, Berlin (finals)
Industry
Automotive
Campaign Type
Grassroots community tournament · Multi-country coordination · Live broadcast production · Talent integration
Platforms
Twitch · Discord · Toornament · Social media
Service
Campaign Coordination (The Morgue)
THE CONTEXT
Kia had something most automotive brands in esports spend years trying to build: an official partnership with the LEC, Europe's premier League of Legends competition. A top-tier sponsorship.
A logo on the broadcast. Brand visibility in front of millions of viewers.
And none of that was the problem.
The problem was that top-tier sponsorship visibility and genuine community credibility are two different things — and esports audiences
know the difference. Caedrel has 1.3M Twitch followers. Drakos has
hosted the LEC for years. The audience that watches them has seen
enough brand integrations to recognise, immediately, when a sponsor
is paying for access versus earning it.
Kia wanted to earn it. The brief was a grassroots community tournament: a competition designed around the fans themselves, built from regional qualifiers across multiple European countries through to live finals at the LEC Studios in Berlin, with LEC casters at the desk and real esports infrastructure for players who had never competed on a stage like that before.
The goal wasn't impressions. It was proof that Kia actually gave something to the community rather than taking from it.
THE CHALLENGE
Grassroots tournaments are operationally deceptive. They appear simpler than top-tier productions — smaller budgets, amateur players, no franchise obligations — but they carry a specific failure risk that
top-tier events don't: the audience is also the participant.
When a professional esports event has production problems, the audience is disappointed. When a community tournament has production problems, the participants — the fans who registered, qualified, and showed up believing this was a real opportunity — are the ones who bear the cost.
That audience doesn't forget. And in a community as vocal as League
of Legends, they don't stay quiet about it.
The structural challenge was building tournament infrastructure that
could handle participants from multiple European countries simultaneously: a registration system across Discord and Toornament, regional qualifier brackets that fed correctly into semifinals, and a grand finals production at the LEC Studios in Berlin that felt like a real competitive event — not a branded activation with a tournament format attached.
The talent challenge was different: Caedrel and Drakos are LEC-level
casters. Their involvement validated the tournament's legitimacy in a
way no marketing budget could replicate. But talent at that level has
scheduling complexity, brief requirements, and audience expectations
that require careful management. Their presence had to feel natural —
casters doing what they do — rather than promotional.
And across all of it: five influencers and one brand ambassador
promoting the event to their own communities, each with different
audience profiles and content styles, each needing to communicate
the same tournament journey without making it feel like a coordinated
marketing campaign.
THE INVESTIGATION
Scope
✦ End-to-end tournament framework design: full participant journey
from application through regional qualifiers, semifinals, and grand finals — built to handle multi-country participation without structural failures at any stage of progression
✦ Discord server setup and administration: participant management,
bracket communication, rule enforcement, community engagement,
and real-time support across the entire tournament duration — the operational backbone that kept 460 participants informed and engaged throughout
✦ Toornament platform integration: registration system configuration,
bracket management, and results tracking across all tournament stages
✦ Talent and influencer management:
— LEC casters Caedrel and Drakos: brief coordination, scheduling,
content alignment, and on-site hosting at the LEC Studios finals
— 5 influencers + 1 brand ambassador: coordinated promotion
across their respective communities, ensuring consistent
tournament narrative without homogenising their individual
content voices
✦ Promotional content and trailer production featuring key esports
talents — announcement assets, bracket reveal content, and
promotional materials calibrated to build genuine participant
anticipation rather than generic event marketing
✦ Livestreamed grand finals production at the LEC Studios in Berlin:
on-site coordination, broadcast setup, talent management on the day,
and production oversight to ensure the finals delivered the
competitive atmosphere participants had earned their way into
✦ Social media integration and community storytelling across the full
tournament timeline — content strategy running before (announcement, qualifier updates), during (live coverage, bracket progression), and after (highlights, results, participant stories) to maximise reach and community investment at every stage
Role: Project Manager (covering lead PM during leave)
KEY FINDINGS
01 —
Grassroots credibility requires infrastructure, not just intention. Kia's positioning as a community supporter wasn't established by the brand saying it supported grassroots talent. It was established by building a tournament that actually functioned as a competitive pathway — regional qualifiers that meant something, a finals stage that felt earned, and production quality that respected the participants' investment of time and effort. Intention without operational delivery is just messaging.
02 —
The participant experience and the broadcast experience require separate but coordinated planning. 460 participants needed tournament infrastructure — registration, brackets, communication, scheduling — that worked reliably at every stage. 84K unique viewers needed a broadcast that was worth watching. These are different products serving different audiences, and compromising one for the other is what turns community tournaments into PR exercises. Both had to be right simultaneously.
03 —
Talent selection is the fastest credibility transfer mechanism available to non-endemic brands. Caedrel and Drakos didn't just host the finals. Their involvement told the League of Legends community — immediately and without any brand copy required — that this was a legitimate competitive event. No amount of brand messaging achieves that signal as efficiently as the right talent saying yes. Managing that talent correctly — in a way that let them be themselves rather than brand-scripted — was what kept the signal intact.
THE RESULTS
Operational delivery: All tournament stages completed on schedule across multiple European countries. Regional qualifiers filled without structural failures. Grand finals produced at LEC Studios Berlin without reported broadcast or on-site incidents.
All influencer and talent deliverables met.
Long-term impact: The tournament repositioned Kia's LEC partnership from logo placement to active community investment. The distinction matters commercially: a brand that is seen to give something to an esports community — a real competitive opportunity, a genuine stage — builds the kind of audience goodwill that passive
sponsorship visibility cannot generate and that no single activation can buy retroactively.
For a non-endemic brand in a community as brand-sceptical as League of Legends, that repositioning is the result that compounds.
84K
Unique Twitch viewers
10K
Peak concurrent viewers
7K
Average concurrent viewers
460
Tournament participants
6
Influencers and ambassadors
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
This tournament succeeded because every operational decision — from how the brackets were structured to how the casters were briefed to how participants received updates on Discord — was made in service of one thing: making the community feel that their participation mattered.
That's not a values statement. It's an operational discipline that requires coordinating a dozen moving parts toward a single audience-facing goal rather than a brand-facing one.
If your sponsorships are generating impressions without generating community equity — or if your brand's presence in a space feels like occupation rather than participation — that's a diagnosable problem.
Let's find out what's actually missing.
The Beliefs That Built This Business
Belief 1
Conversion problems are psychological problems wearing a technical disguise.
Brands spend thousands optimizing button colors and testing headlines while the real cause of death — invisible cognitive friction, trust collapse, loss aversion triggers — goes completely unexamined...
Belief 2
Most marketing research tells you what customers say. Consumer neuroscience tells you what they do.
There's a gap between what people report in surveys and what they actually do...
Belief 3
Operational experience is not optional for a marketing consultant.
You cannot diagnose a campaign you've never had to deliver...
Belief 4
Honest findings are more valuable than comfortable ones.
I will tell you what's actually killing your conversions — not what's easiest to hear...
PRIOR INVESTIGATIONS — FIELD RECORD
The Work Before The Consumer Autopsy
Before building a forensic investigation consultancy, there were 16 years of campaigns, projects, and client relationships. Here's what that actually looked like.
€2.6M
Earned media value
KitKat LFL Esports
84M+
Total impressions
Single campaign
275%
ROI
SEAT x MAD Lions
84K
Unique Twitch viewers
Kia x LoL Series
The Evidence
PUMA · LG · KITKAT · MAGNUM · SANTANDER · KIA · FOOT LOCKER · SEAT · GARNIER · GEN.G · NORAUTO · MOUV' · DEL ARTE ·
Both projects explore the same core question from different angles: how do different brains process information, make decisions, and find meaning?
The Other Investigation
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In 10 Months:
1.32M
Pinterest impressions
50%
newsletter open rates (industry average: 21%)
250+
Email Subscribers
100%
Steady passive revenue through digital products
THE DETECTIVE BEHIND THE AUTOPSY
THE PROBLEM I KEPT SEEING
For almost four years, I managed the execution of marketing campaigns for brands like PUMA, LG, KitKat, Seat and Magnum as a Senior Project Manager at an international esports and gaming consulting agency. Timelines, budgets, influencer activations, social campaigns, film productions - I coordinated it all.
And I had a front-row seat to something nobody talked about: campaigns that were perfectly executed, delivered on time, within budget... and still didn't convert the way they should. The creative was strong. The targeting was right. The execution was flawless. But somewhere between the first touchpoint and the final conversion, customers disappeared.
THE QUESTION NOBODY WAS ASKING
I worked across esports, gaming, healthcare, finance and tech over 16+ years in customer experience and project management. Different industries, different brands, different budgets. Same pattern. Same cause of death. And in almost every post-mortem, the conversation went the same way: "Let's test a new headline". "Maybe the claim is wrong". "We need more traffic".
Nobody was asking the right question: why are customers behaving this way?
CASE FILE: N. Remis
10+
Global
Brands
Across
Europe
&
APAC
3
Languages: French, Spanish & English
16+ Years in
Customer
Experience
What to Expect
Three honest statements about how I work — no platitudes, no agency language, no promises I can't keep.
01
I will tell you what I find — not what you want to hear.
If your campaign is failing because of a fundamental positioning
problem, I'll say so. If the issue is a single friction point
fixable in 48 hours, I'll say that too.
The investigation determines the answer — not the budget, not
what's easiest to implement, not what protects anyone's ego.
You're paying for a forensic diagnosis, not reassurance.
02
I work remotely, globally, and asynchronously.
Based in Gijón, Spain. Fluent in Spanish, French, and English.
Eight years managing remote projects across Europe, APAC, and
the Americas taught me how to communicate clearly across time
zones, cultures, and languages without losing precision.
Remote work isn't a limitation. It's how I've delivered €2.6M
earned media campaigns and coordinated teams across six continents.
03
I'm building this in public.
The Consumer Autopsy is new. I'm not going to pretend otherwise
or hide behind corporate language that obscures the timeline.
What I bring: 16 years of real operational experience, rigorous
training in consumer psychology, and a genuine obsession with
understanding why customers behave the way they do.
If that's what your business needs — let's talk.
THE DETECTIVE BEHIND THE AUTOPSY
WHAT I ACTUALLY BELIEVE
I believe most marketing fails at the psychological level, not the executional one. Customers don't abandon carts because your checkout has too many steps. They abandon because something triggered loss aversion, created decision fatigue or broke the trust you spent weeks building. The friction is invisible which is why it's so dangerous.
And I believe the only way to fix it is to stop guessing and start investigating. Treat every conversion problem like a forensic case. Follow the evidence. Find the cause of death. Prescribe the exact fix.
WHY I WENT BACK TO STUDY
I spent years on the execution side wondering why no one was studying the psychology behind what I was seeing. So I did. Consumer Neuroscience & Neuromarketing at Copenhagen Business School. Market Research & Consumer Behavior at IE Business School. Google UX Design and Data Analytics certifications.
The more I studied, the more I recognized the patterns I'd been watching for years - finally explained by the science. The Consumer Autopsy is what happens when 8+ years of managing campaigns from the inside meets the psychology of why they live or die.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
When you work with me, you're not getting a theorist who's read the textbooks but never managed a real campaign. You're getting someone who has coordinated the timelines, chased the assets, sat in the client calls, watched the KPIs drop and then went back to study the psychological mechanisms behind all of it.
That combination - operational experience plus behavioral science - is exactly what forensic marketing investigation requires.
CASE FILE: N. Remis
10+
Global
Brands
Across
Europe
&
APAC
3
Languages: French, Spanish & English
16+ Years in
Customer
Experience
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