Esports and gaming creative marketing agency Hurrah.agency has ceased operations, eight years after its launch.
The agency’s holding structure, Hurrah.group, will cease activities later this year. However, its media buying arm hurrah.media and production company Hurrah.studio will continue to operate going forward.
The news was announced by Hurrah.group’s Global CEO Mathieu Lacrouts via a LinkedIn statement. In the post, Lacrouts highlighted cash-related issues as the reason the agency has closed its doors.
“The agency has not been exempted from the crisis that the esports industry has been suffering from for over a year now,” he said. “Things have been hard and we just didn’t have the necessary cash flow to pull through yet another crisis after COVID-19.
“It ain’t fun, but it is what it is. Eight years of turning my passion into a business, profitable for a while, until it was not.”
Hurrah.agency has previously worked with notable stakeholders within the esports and gaming space. This ranged from game developers like Ubisoft, Riot Games and Paradox Interactive to huge non-endemic brands such as Renault, Coca Cola and Domino’s.
However, whilst the French company’s marketing agency has closed, Lacrouts will still continue his roles at Hurrah’s other divisions. It is not clear whether they will operate independently given Lacrouts highlighted that its holding structure would close down.
Hurrah becomes the latest esports and gaming casualty during the so-called ‘esports winter’, joining the likes of Gfinity, Copenhagen Flames and eUnited, among many others.
Alongside Lacrouts, Hurrah was also co-founded by Angela Natividad, an editor and strategist who is currently the European Markets Editor for advertising awards programme The Clio Awards. She left the company in January 2020.
Lacrouts continued: “I’ve hesitated quite heavily about how or when to post the message. But there will never be a good time to share a piece of bad business news. My goal with this is merely to let most people I’ve encountered throughout the last eight years know that this chapter closes.”