Left to right: Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat, Stuart Saw of Endeavor, and Joe Barnes of Anheuser Busch.

Anheuser-Busch, brand sponsorships, and esports: Jump in, the beer is fine

Joe Barnes didn’t have enough data to know if esports and Bud Light were a good mix. Market watches like Nielsen are paying attention to esports, but they don’t have nearly as much data as they do for mainstream media such as television.

But Barnes, the head of experiential marketing at Bud Light, dove in anyway. He brainstormed with advisers like Stuart Saw, a senior vice president at the marketing agency Endeavor, and they came up with activations for games such as Overwatch. In one such activation, fans had to push a “payload” of beer a certain distance, just as players have to shoot their opponents and move a payload across a map during esports matches for the Overwatch League.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.