Helping brands make awesome stuff on Twitch

As a part of the Brand Partnerships Studio, I concepted and pitched pre-sales creative ideas to brands to help them get a seat at the gaming table. Our audiences could sniff out an imposter faster than chat moves, so bringing brands into the community is a carefully planned and executed task.

Brand activations are always grounded in audience insights and community trends. If we’re lucky, we also get to hack the platform a bit, too.

Brand partners are too many to name, but verticals included Finance, Beauty, Fashion, Food & Bev, Auto, Entertainment, QSR, Retail, and Personal Care.

Here are a just a few of the fun programs that I’ve worked on

Levi’s Election 2020

Goal: Inspire young adults to register to vote by empowering them with knowledge and making them feel comfortable using their voices.

Strategy: Create an engaging conversation around voting by tapping into the Twitch community’s desire to connect with the streamers they love.

Idea: Host a pre-debate talk show with Twitch streamers that addresses the topics that are important to young voters and focuses on education and registration.

How it went down: The talk-show stream featured 3 Twitch influencers with different backgrounds and voting experiences. The conversation focused on providing information on voting and voter registration, and was broken into mini-game interactive segments, pop quizzes, chat polls, and time for personal anecdotes from the streamers.

Despite the debate that day being cancelled, the stream succeeded in driving significant conversation and establishing Levi’s as a champion for democracy.

Results: 22,669 Max Concurrents | 580K views | 2M minutes watched | 4700 chats

Discover: Social Security Alerts

As part of a year-long program including Live Streams and Partnerships with HBCU’s and the Women’s NHL, I worked with Discover to create a custom commercial catered specifically for Twitch audiences. The commercial starred beloved streamer Jon Sandman and highlighted a worry that is very much top of mind within our community–identity theft. While the messaging still pretty directly supporting the Discover product, the creative execution took Twitch audiences interests into consideration and highlighted trending stream categories like fitness and travel. The spot ran during streamer initiated ‘commercial breaks’ and helped Discover feel like they belonged on the platform, even as a non-endemic brand.

General Mills: Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Goal: Position Cinnamon Toast Crunch as the brand that will help tweens fulfill experiences they crave-in and out of the cereal bowl.

Strategy: Connect with Tweens on Twitch by creating a playful, multi-sensory experience customized just for them while keeping craveability and taste top of mind.

Idea: Create a custom Cinnamon Toast Crunch Twitch emote and amplify it during an interactive Sponsored Stream with a Twitch Influencer.

How it went down: Our team launched a new, global Twitch emote based on Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s existing cinnamoji characters. The emote was a part of Twitch’s library for 3 months, deeply embedding Cinnamon Toast Crunch into Twitch culture.

Then, we helped Cinnamon Toast Crunch host an influencer stream with a custom Twitch extension. The extension was inspired by the concept of a dunk tank…but we put a cinna-spin on it and dunked a cinnemoji into a bowl of cereal! To give people irresistible experiences that they can feel, our extension included sound fx, milk splashes, and celebrations from the other cinnemojis in the bowl. 

During the stream, chat was challenged to dunk the cinnamoji by using the #CTC emote in chat. Flooding chat with the emote filled up a meter on screen, and once it was full, the cinnemoji was dunked and chat was rewarded with Cinnamon Toast Crunch swag bag. 

Results: 19,586 max concurrents (390% over benchmark) | XXXX views | 1.8 M minutes watched (530% over benchmark) | 16,005 emotes used

Cadillac: Escalade

Goal: Build buzz around the launch of the new 2021 Cadillac Escalade among gaming audiences.

Insight: Twitch audiences know their favorite streamers inside and out and take pride in being supportive mega-fans.

Strategy: Put Twitch audience members’ knowledge of streamers to the test and pay off their devotion in a big way.

Idea: Create a mini-series of streams that featured a mystery challenger who’ll pair up with a Twitch gaming influencer and play together. The catch? Chat has to correctly guess the mystery challenger’s identity in order to learn who they are.

How it went down: We created a branded mini-series called ‘The Mystery Gamer', complete with a custom show open that showcased the 2021 Escalade and set up the premise of a mystery challenger. During each stream, the duo would complete gaming challenges. For every gaming challenge they completed, a clue about the Mystery Gamer would be revealed to the audience to help chat guess their identity. Throughout the stream our talent would sprinkle in info about the Escalade, and we even lucked out and got Wavy to do a rap.

Results: Episode 1 - 20,527 max concurrents (316% over benchmark) | 654,807 minutes watched (252% over benchmark) | 4,303 chat interactions / Episode 2 - 23,334 max concurrents (359% over benchmark) | 965,073 minutes watched (371% over benchmark) | 4,965 chat interactions / Episode 3 - 21,761 max concurrents (335% over benchmark) | 892,773 minutes watched (343% over benchmark) | 3,098 chat interactions

Apartments.com