Esports Uprising.

For the inaugural Esports World Cup, AIM built a city-by-city takeover system that turned every major gaming community into a hometown headline. Fifteen cities, fifteen tribes, one shared language of spectacle — each announcement built around the inside references and icons that make each game unmistakable to its players.

The brief came through Leo Borges, ECD at Havas Dubai — a long-time friend and creative partner — who brought AIM in early with a clear challenge: launch the tournament without flattening the diversity of its audience. Esports counts more than 3.2 billion players worldwide, second only to football, yet its community is splintered across genres, publishers, and cultures. The goal was to rally every tribe under one banner while honoring the codes, iconographies, and hometowns that define each game.

From that shared starting point, AIM led the visual production across fifteen cities and fifteen communities. Each announcement was anchored in a single insider reference — the Counter-Strike chicken planted on a bridge in Cologne, a giant kun looming over Shenzhen for Honor of Kings, a Free Fire gloo wall rising out of Rio, the CN Tower lit as an Overwatch dragon, a Porsche Rennsport bursting past the Bavaria statue in Munich. Live-action plates, photogrammetry, Unreal, Houdini, and a generative AI pipeline were composited into a single visual register so every city read as one campaign with fifteen distinct accents.

The work scaled across vertical social, OOH, broadcast, and press. Earned media followed: Reuters, CNN, IGN, Arab News, ESPN-adjacent trades, and the publishers themselves all amplified the announcements inside their own communities. 500M total viewers, 2M attendees, 122M+ views across assets, and $28.4M in earned media value — a result of the trust and shorthand built with Leo and the Havas Dubai team over years of working together.

Alongside the launch campaign, AIM developed a concept extension for the Las Vegas Sphere — the largest spherical display on earth — proposing the Esports World Cup as the first global gaming takeover of the venue. The piece below previsualizes that idea: the tournament identity rendered at Sphere scale on the Strip.