Arguably the world’s most unconventional advertiser Burger King has taken to streaming platform Twitch for its latest campaign – and not everyone is happy.
In a campaign created by Ogilvy, Burger King hijacked a Twitch’s donation feature.
Usually, a viewer can make a donation and share a message for the streamer, which is read out live by an automated bot.
Rather than sharing a message of support, however, Burger King used the feature to read out special meal deals – more or less turning the stream into an ad.
You can see it here.
https://twitter.com/Ogilvy/status/1295707612315553799?s=20
And while the campaign is very on-brand for Burger King, it seems to have upset the Twitch community, which has strict guidelines in place for streamers to disclose ads.
Gamer RubberNinja, real name Ross O’Donovan, told the BBC that he had fallen foul to the stunt.
“We generally follow protocol when it comes to doing advertisements. You have to disclose that it’s an ad to your viewers,” he said.
“It costs a lot more than $5 for a company to partner with a streamer, so it’s just very scummy to circumvent that whole thing and do it through a donation.
“It’s not fair and I hope they use this as a study to show marketing students in the future what is OK and what is not OK, because this definitely wasn’t.”
