Barns Coffee × E-Sports World Cup

A limited-edition campaign that made a coffee cup the trophy of the E-Sports World Cup.

Creative Direction Campaigns Brand Identity Food & Drink

Barns Coffee asked for a co-brand with the E-Sports World Cup that felt native to gaming culture, not a coffee brand cosplaying in it. The brief demanded fluency in both worlds, without either identity losing ground.

The answer was to treat the cup as the trophy. Hero compositions lit it from below against a battlefield haze, gold-accented Arabic and English lockups built to scale from a phone screen to tournament broadcast.

Barns Coffee × E-Sports World Cup, detail

Creative Direction

Nine compositions, one visual language — cinematic enough for the arena, precise enough for the shelf.

Creative Direction

Nine hero compositions and a full suite of social verticals were designed to hold at portrait crop for feeds and at full-width for event display: the same asset doing both jobs without compromise.

The collector-cup format gave the campaign a physical anchor. Something fans would actually queue for.

Creative Direction

The cup didn't just carry the brand. It became the trophy.

"Where the battlefield meets the café."

Barns Coffee × E-Sports World Cup, featured

Barns Coffee came with an unusual brief: co-brand with the E-Sports World Cup in a way that felt genuinely native to gaming culture — not a coffee brand borrowing its aesthetic for a season. The challenge was fluency in both worlds simultaneously. Dropping the Barns identity into arena lighting and calling it a day would have read as costume. The direction we took instead was structural: find the object that already lives at the intersection of both rituals, and let that object carry the whole campaign.

The answer was the cup itself — recast as a trophy. Hero compositions lit the collector cup from below against a battlefield haze, warrior aesthetics and gold-accented typography treating it with the gravity of an artefact. Arabic and English lockups were engineered to work as equals: both versions carrying equal visual weight, both built to hold legibility from a phone screen at portrait crop to full-width tournament broadcast. The bilingual design system wasn't an afterthought — it was a structural constraint that shaped every compositional decision.

Nine hero compositions and a full suite of social-native verticals gave the campaign range without diluting its identity. The same assets moved from in-store placements to digital out-of-home to tournament broadcast overlays without losing tension. Every frame was designed to carry the cinematic weight of the arena and the brand clarity of a retail environment at once — two very different display contexts demanding the same single creative resolve.

The collector-cup format gave everything a physical anchor. A campaign this visually charged needed an object at its centre that people would actually want to hold — something fans would queue for. By turning a disposable cup into a limited-edition artefact of the tournament, the campaign built a genuine bridge between two audiences without asking either side to compromise who they are.

Client

Barns Coffee

Industry

Food & Drink

Services

Creative Direction
Campaigns
Brand Identity

Office

Riyadh

Year

2024

Studio

HoopAI Creative Studio