Our objective was to tell gamers that mio will keep them hydrated and energized for long gaming sessions. To do so, we targeted the biggest live-streaming platform for gamers, Twitch.
The Twitch community is tightly knit. Gamers and streamers are very specific about brands they accept into their domain. That’s why brands who show that they truly understand them stand out. Twitch streamers broadcast for hours, often neglecting hydration. This leads to low energy streams and disengaged audiences. mio adds energy to water, making it the perfect fuel for long streaming sessions. But how could we get streamers and their audiences to hear us on a platform that notoriously hates ads? By hijacking native Twitch behaviors and squeezing mio Energy directly into the conversation.
Dehydration is such an issue amongst streamers, Twitch installed a !hydrate command that viewers use to remind distracted streamers to drink water. You type !hydrate in chat, streamers drink. We saw this as an opportunity. So, we decided to champion the use of the !hydrate command by heading onto Twitch ourselves and surprising streamers and their audiences when it was triggered.
We wanted to make the Twitch !hydrate command an ownable moment for mio Energy by using it in a way that it had never been used before. To do this properly, we had to capitalize on commonly used Twitch functions, without purchasing ads that gamers and streamers just find annoying. We knew we had to show up at the exact moment streamers were being reminded to hydrate, to let them know that mio is the perfect solution for weariness.
The !hydrate command was mio’s perfect call to action, so we did the unexpected and created dozens of Twitch accounts, naming them after our various products and flavors. Then, we joined unsuspecting streams and reminded streamers to !hydrate. Just like mio adds energy to water, we brought energy directly to streams the moment streamers hydrated. We used Twitch’s raid feature, which sends the audience of one stream to another, to deliver an audience of dozens of unique mio accounts to streams, bringing them exactly what they want most: bigger audiences and high-energy chats. We hyped up streamers, gave away Twitch subscriptions, and became the subject of conversation for thousands of users.
Instead of interrupting streams with distracting ads like most brands, we became a part of streamers content. Twitch users talked about mio for hours, reaching a niche audience organically and natively by squeezing ourselves into the conversation. We became a part of the notoriously gated community that only streamers and gamers share.
Over only 3 days, we turned streams into thousands of mio ads and streamers into brand influencers without official partnerships. Engagement rose 88% in Twitch chats and over 900% above the benchmark on our social channels, leading to a 33% increase in traffic to our Amazon pages. All for $0 in media.
