People Behind BLAST: Alexander Lewin

It’s been seven years, so almost since BLAST’s beginning. I was the first employee of the company outside of Denmark, the first UK employee. That means I had the opportunity to witness BLAST grow from, at the time, a Danish TO to a globally successful Esports Entertainment Company, which was super exciting.

From the beginning, even though at the time we were relatively small, I always envisioned and hoped that one day we would become the global player that we’ve now turned into.

I have always been in entertainment - I started my career with linear children's TV channels, followed by a start-up that specialised in VOD content. Just before BLAST, I was at Maker Studios, a YouTube MCN. And before that I spent five years at VICE, heading up their European distribution and programming.

One of the things which runs as a common thread throughout everything that I've ever done, is that it was always important to me to truly believe in the product and the mission of a place. I was fortunate enough to always be at the forefront of where the world of entertainment was going. Particularly now in the world of esports, it's really exciting to be shaping where this huge part of the entertainment world is headed.

Together with the members of the commercial team, I look after media rights, sponsorships and parts of our digital revenue - which combined make up a significant part of BLAST’s total revenue. It's my job to ensure that we hit our financial targets in these fields, and that we onboard and retain clients across the ecosystem that benefit from BLAST’s immense reach, audience and broadcast product - and who mirror our standard of excellence.

A key component of all of this is to make sure that our overall proposition is presented to the market in a way that both endemic and non-endemic clients consider partnering with BLAST to be a great business choice - both from a commercial and from a client satisfaction point of view.

The commercial unit, which is headed up by Leo Matlock as Chief Business Officer, combines media rights, sponsorships, destinations and publisher relations. All of that is just under 20 people, and my own remit covers the first two of these lines of business.

If you dig in to the details, media rights looks after linear TV channels, online partners and streamers, while the sponsorship team secures commercial partners for all of our ecosystems across their respective season and all global events. And the partnerships team onboards these commercial partners and ensures that they have the best possible corporate experience and ROI. In addition to that, we look after the revenue of our digital channels: Twitch, YouTube, Kick and TikTok.

That’s a tough one - I've been with BLAST for a long time, and over the years we've had a number of really great projects. My favourite projects and deals, outside of the ones that bring significant revenue to the company, are the ones that are innovative initiatives - the type of deals that our competitors might want to copy.

That includes, for example, BLAST Rising, which we created during the pandemic, when we realized a spike in demand for additional content, and that there was an opportunity to create that content remotely and have it fully financed by a data partner - and years later it's now pivoted into our BLAST Premier proposition.

Others that come to mind are the groundbreaking partnerships we had with Novo Nordisk or with Revolut. Both partnerships were the first of their kind and we were delighted to team up with these industry-leading partners in their respective fields.

On a related note, I’m also the proud inventor of Classical Tuesday, which is my attempt to bring the joys of Mozart and Chopin to the London office every Tuesday morning.

So there's a large number of projects that I'm really thrilled about. To begin, we have an innovative betting sponsor strategy for Dota that I'm keen to see play out successfully and the team’s working very hard on that. Then there is an official time keeping strategy that, if successful, will work out for all of our ecosystems from R6 to Premier to Dota and RLCS/FNCS, so I'm really keen to make this happen.

If I think about the regions that we're excited about, we’ll turn even more of our focus to the Chinese market, where we will combine media rights and sponsorship in a more integrative manner. Lastly, and the list could go on and on, the monetization of Fortnite is really, really exciting. It has never been done before and offers tons of opportunity for large and innovative deals.

The bulk of the attention is already on 2025 and we have done quite a number of 2025 deals. With the imminent Dota launch, we'll still be adding territories and sponsors in ‘24. There are a couple of individual deals that we're still looking to close for this year, but the focus is now on 2025.

For me, it’s always special to go to Brazil and see the passion of the fans there. Of course we get glimpses of that passion wherever we go, our fans are fantastic globally, but there is a certain flair to the fans in Brazil that makes an event there really unique. Whether that is the SI in Sao Paulo or whether that's a BLAST Pro Series event in the past, Brazil stands out in terms of the passion of the fans.

I really enjoy all BLAST’s events, whether they're in a studio with a small audience or whether they are in a huge arena. I just find it exciting, that thrill when we go live and all that work becomes visible in front of a live audience at home and in arena - and the constant race for strong viewership numbers.

That said, one event that really stood out for me was the Paris Major because it was perhaps the first time when it dawned on me how big BLAST had become. I could see it with the broadcasters we had on-site, with the amount of streamers that were visiting, the corporate guests, with the huge crowd and great atmosphere, the announcement by an acting head of state.

There was also so much media present. It just became so obvious that the Champions League that I always knew we were playing in was now real, and for everybody to see.

The SI in Sao Paulo and the Rocket League Worlds in Fort Worth in Texas were fantastic. To be fair, I didn't go to the Fortnite CS and Premier WF in Singapore, but I can assume it was similar. These stand out because they highlighted our ability to entertain huge audiences across different ecosystems and across different continents.

The pace of BLAST has become so intense that we rarely find the time to celebrate our achievements. The minute an event ends we’re already in preparation for the next one. But if you look at some of the footage or pictures of what we've done across the year, you realize that we've sold tens of thousands of tickets tens of thousands of miles apart and entertained a global audience in dozens of languages.

I think that would be a really bad idea. I'm lacking about 10,000 hours on the server to be a good player. And if this was any other role in front of the camera, our pitch of having the best entertainment product and the highest production value would suffer, probably a fatal blow. I think I'll stick to deal-making behind the camera.

I am a Bayern Munich supporter, although admittedly a little bit of a sunshine fan. And I'm a huge music fan - I love to play the piano, and I play the guitar as well.

I'm also a pretty solid defender at football, I play about once a week and that's a lot of fun. Other than that I love to travel whenever I get the chance, and that's quite often because of the globality of the job. I aim to see at least one site when we go somewhere.