Burger King’s Twitch Marketing Experiment Backfires

Franchise brands hoping to reach new audiences with experimental marketing strategies would do well to get to know the landscape they are entering before diving in.

That’s a lesson Burger King learned the hard way recently after a marketing campaign by Ogilvy-owned agency David Madrid backfired somewhat dramatically.

The campaign was designed to leverage videogame streaming platform Twitch’s bottom-up engagement mechanisms to reach a wide audience at a low cost. Twitch is designed to allow users to interact directly with content creators by posting messages that can be read in real time by both streamers and audiences. The platform also offers a feature that will read user messages out loud when they donate money to a streamer. Madrid’s campaign took advantage of that feature by donating to popular Twitch channels to have ad copy read out loud during streams.

Twitch users were less than thrilled with the approach, which many saw as an incursion into a community that is famously protective of its culture.

But, as AdAge points out, while the gambit backfired for Burger King, David Madrid is still touting the campaign as a creative success. In fact, the campaign was launched and quickly ended back in July with little fanfare, and it wasn’t until David Madrid released a video promoting the campaign last week that Twitch streamers and users began to speak out against the campaign.

“Hacking Twitch for a cheap marketing stunt will win awards for the agency, but it won’t win the hearts and minds of gamers for Burger King,” Chris Erb, CEO of gaming-focused agency Tripleclix told AdAge.

Awards aside, upsetting your client is rarely a winning strategy for marketing agencies, particularly when the client is one of the largest franchise brands in the world.