Experience is key / According to Forbes, experiential marketing can help build lasting connections between brands and consumers. Brett Hyman, president and founder at NVE Experience Agency, told the publication: ‘Well-executed experiential activations turn consumers from passive viewers to active participants.’ How, then, does a brand ensure that experiential marketing reaches as many people as possible? For Netflix, the secret was in making certain that the participants shared their experience on social media. By creating a surprising and perfectly themed interactive event, Netflix was able to harness the power of the influencers and reach their sizeable followings – after all, who wouldn’t want to document live a vampire running rampant around an aeroplane? This turned what would otherwise have been an enclosed PR stunt looking for the media to pick up, into an activation that travelled far beyond the metal cabin to an eager audience on social media.
Adding value / Twitch is an attractive platform to engage people on: according to Twitch Tracker, the average amount of concurrent channels streaming on Twitch in January 2022 is 106,000, while the average audience size tuning in to watch these is 2.97 million viewers. Even more impressive, these people are watching on average 95 minutes of Twitch content per day, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.
But brands have to turn up appropriately on the platform. ‘On Twitch, you have a whole lot of different interaction. It’s not similar to any other platform. Most of the influencers on YouTube try to sell products. On Twitch they do entertainment.’ So said Grischa Mentgen, Jung Von Matt SPORTS creative director, speaking to Contagious about McDonald’s Germany activating on the platform for its Sub Bomb Delivery campaign.
And entertain is what Netflix did here, seamlessly positioning itself and its product within the Twitch sphere, creating an engaging experience that connects with how users interact with the platform. Also, the two-tiered approach (consisting of influencers and gamers) ensured online users from different demographics could experience the activation, amplifying the campaign’s reach further. Netflix’s campaign illustrates yet again how brands can reach passionate Twitch communities by producing fun, entertaining content.
Game on / While Twitch is known for its live streams, Netflix took full advantage of the platform’s features to not only create the interactive element of the event but gamifying the experience so that Twitch users went from spectators to participants. Back in 2014, an anonymous Australian programmer developed what became known as Twitch Plays Pokémon, a stream where viewers could control the direction of the Pokémon by typing directional commands into the chat. An instant success, the experiment now holds the Guinness World Record for the most participants on a single-player online video game. Evidently, interactivity is something that fares well on Twitch.
