Can This Man Make His Video Gaming Team a $1 Billion Business?

Jack Etienne had reinvented himself. He’d gone from an eager photocopier salesman with an obsessive evening-and-weekends video game habit to the chief executive officer at a professional video-game-playing company that generates millions of dollars a year in sponsorships. In 2017, he committed more than $30 million in investment funds buying a spot in two of the world’s top esports leagues, where pro video gamers compete in front of huge audiences. Now those Silicon Valley investors expect him to turn his team, Cloud9, into a global entertainment business. So, this April, searching for clues as to how he might do that, Etienne flew to New Orleans to experience WrestleMania 34.

He watched the wrestling, but he also wanted to see how the executives guided advertisers through this strange world. One afternoon, Etienne took his seat at the WWE’s Business Partner Summit. There, a wrestler named Elias strummed a guitar and performed an ode to brands. In fewer than two minutes, Elias name-checked KFC, Snickers, YouTube, Snapchat, Mattel, Old Spice, NBC, Sony and China’s PPTV. It was a sales master class. Etienne saw that the WWE knew how to hold advertisers’ hands, inculcating them in the appeal of their crazy characters under the guise of a business update. The WWE had figured out how to turn fake wrestling into a business worth $6.1 billion.