How do you do, fellow gamers?—Burger King exploits Twitch for cheap ads

Enlarge / Ogilvy boasted about its ad campaign with the following claim. We have edited it slightly. (credit: Ogilvy / Ars Technica)

Earlier this week, an advertising agency emerged with a video bragging about an ad-campaign concept: We'll invade gaming-filled Twitch chat rooms and post ads for your brand for cheap. The attached video was exactly the kind of cringe you might expect from "brand engages with video game culture," with edgy yet inoffensive quotes, footage of fake games, and digitally altered voices.

But what looked like a fake ad concept has turned out to be very real-and after examining how Twitch works, the whole thing looks like a possible FTC violation.

More like king of steaming-mad Twitch users"

The ad campaign, run by the Ogilvy agency on behalf of Burger King, relied on a common Twitch trope of donating to game-streaming hosts. "Affiliate" Twitch users are eligible to receive cash from viewers, either in the form of flat-rate subscriptions or variable one-time donations, and hosts often encourage this by adding text-to-voice automation to the process. So if you pay a certain amount, a voice will read your statement out loud-and hosts usually retroactively react to weird and offensive statements made by these systems instead of pre-screening them. (They're busy playing a game, after all.)

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