Karate Combat

Kicking through the noise.

The Art of Combat.

From the birth of the league, Brand Knew and Karate Combat’s integrated partnership was focused towards growing the global reach of the brand as a legitimate and established player within MMA & professional sports.

Karate Combat is the first professional league to produce immersive fights before greenscreens. Karate Combat transports fans into virtual worlds, both past and future, bringing an extra dynamic layer of entertainment to their product and offering some of the most innovative sponsorship integrations in sports.

The Art of Combat.

The Fight for a Title Belt.

When identifying Karate Combat’s core objectives and growth goals, the primary areas of focus were increasing overall viewership of each episode and growing the brand’s social accounts and engagement towards driving sponsorships.

Within a year, Brand Knew was able to achieve extraordinary growth on Karate Combat’s Instagram, more than tripling follower growth from 250k to over 800k followers. Within eighteen months, we eclipsed 1 million followers, averaging 48,000 new followers a month.

By putting Karate Combat’s most compelling content in front of the right target audiences, and fueled by a modest paid budget, the league achieved rapid and broad traction.

Dojo Dominance.

With the rapid growth on Instagram throttled forward through short form video content, Brand Knew sought to replicate Instagram’s success on an entirely new platform, TikTok. In this budding age of short and snackable content, it became clear that Karate Combat’s continued success in digital growth would hinge upon the community building efforts on the world’s fastest-growing social media platform, TikTok.

Starting from scratch on a new platform, Brand Knew was entrusted with developing both organic and paid content strategies that would drive growth, with a primary focus on US males aged 18-35. This content strategy included a mix of in-fight highlights, behind-the-scenes footage, and direct-to-camera UGC content from martial arts legends, highlighting Karate Combat in a way that felt genuinely native to the platform.

In just the first month, we drove 96,000+ new followers, and were the lauded subject of a TikTok case study highlighting the dynamic, scroll-stopping creative developed, and the industry low cost per follower of this initial campaign, the first to use TikTok’s new Spark Ads feature. Users loved the creative, commenting “This is the first ad I haven’t actually skipped” and “I’ve watched this ad literally ten times willingly.”

Within a year, Karate Combat’s TikTok account had passed 1 million followers and over 10 million genuine engagements.Our initial success through TikTok’s paid campaigns qualified Karate Combat for platform beta programs such as live streaming. By being one of the first sports leagues to unlock this feature, we saw massive organic growth and generation of tens of thousands of organic followers during event live streams. Due to these successful follower campaign strategies, and the spirit in which Brand Knew endeavors to leverage bleeding edge technologies,, TikTok crowned Brand Knew Most Innovative Agency of 2023.

Landing the Kick.

After an inaugural season entering a new market, followed by a second season built upon the league’s momentum, Karate Combat was looking to break through in Season 3 to become a broader, notable and more well respected name in MMA.

For Season 3, the main goal through paid efforts was to drive higher viewership numbers of content, some pre-recorded, across linear and digital platforms globally, within tighter viewership windows. To do this, Brand Knew managed pre-promotional and live views, and VOD campaigns driving clicks, and RSVPs for the premiere of each event. Throughout the three month season, Brand Knew’s efforts generated 34 million total views across twelve events, reaching over 160 million fans.

By Season 4, Karate Combat had transitioned to fully live online events, requiring a rethinking of our approach with tune-in campaigns. While generally large viewership numbers were leading to meaningfully impactful brand momentum, Season 4 was about refining our paid strategy to be more efficient, deliberately growing engaged fanbases in key geographic regions. As a result, Season 4 saw larger numbers than Season 3, with even more valuable viewership by focusing on locations like the US and Brazil.

Landing the Kick.

Having now partnered with Karate Combat for nearly 4 years and 43 fights as of 2024, our live+3 viewership regularly tops 20 million views per event, over 5 million of which tune in live. There’s no other league doing live stream numbers at the scale of Karate Combat.

This viewership & engagement growth increased the value of Karate Combat’s captured audience, positioning them well to continue to attract lucrative new sponsors.

Nurturing a Valuable Audience.

As Karate Combat’s audience and viewership continued to grow, brands are taking notice.

Brand Knew has been influential in crafting the growth story for Karate Combat, effectively identifying and shaping Karate Combat’s fanbase in order to attract like-minded brands to sponsor the league. Using third party analytics platforms such as Experian, we have been able to accurately define Karate Combat’s audience across all digital platforms. Leveraging information such as age distribution, gender, audience interests, and household income, we equipped Karate Combat’s sponsorship team with the information necessary to pursue brands interested in targeting Gen Z and Millennial males. The data has allowed their team to pursue and secure multi-million dollar brand partnerships with SushiSwap, Hedera, Manscaped and Natural Light.