Porsche test drives branded games on Amazon’s Twitch

Luxury carmaker Porsche is the first brand to test branded games on Amazon’s livestreaming platform Twitch, Digiday reported. The choose-your-own-adventure-style game let viewers vote on actions taken by two real people equipped with body cameras as they explored a Porsche facility and solved puzzles to reveal the Formula E race car.

The goal of the effort was to have viewers work together to complete the game and unveil the new vehicle, putting the unveiling in the hands of an audience in a way that hasn’t been done before, according to a press release from Porsche released prior to the game.

The livestreamed game debuted on Aug. 28 and had about 28,000 views at any given second, while the total number of views since the broadcast began hit 2 million, Digiday reported.

Netflix last year demonstrated with its “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” interactive movie that millions of viewers were willing to participate in choose-your-own-adventure-style storytelling.

Porsche’s test of an interactive game on Twitch, whose viewership mostly consists of people watching others play video games, may portend more opportunities for brands to engage viewers with interactive content.

The Porsche game lasted more than three hours, requiring a significant commitment among viewers who participated in the game by voting on which actions to take and posting messages to Twitch’s comments feed.

As younger audiences, including many Twitch users, show an aversion to traditional advertising, interactive games may help brands to engage viewers with an entertaining experience while more seamlessly promoting their products and services.

Porsche aimed to promote its first electrical racing car to an audience of people ages 18 to 34 without having to be reliant on TV and radio, Digiday reported.

Games, including interactive videos like Porsche’s, give brands more control over content, helping to alleviate key concerns about brand safety. In developing interactive videos, Twitch works with partnered streamers to help ensure brands avoid inappropriate content.

Branded games are more expensive than typical campaigns on Twitch, whose CPMs range from $2 to $10, an unnamed agency executive told Digiday.

Twitch, which has about 15 million active users who watch the platform’s live streams each day, is exploring how to adapt the interactive overlays that viewers click in branded games for other kinds of games that would be less expensive for advertisers, according to the report.

Interactive content can help brands to gather data about consumers and glean greater insights into their preferences. “Bandersnatch” gave Netflix a chance to measure viewer responses in real time, and generate data that helped to inform its future video recommendations for subscribers.

Choose-your-own adventure programming is likely to become more prominent as platforms like Google’s YouTube seek to develop more shows and specials that urge greater viewer participation.

source: http://www.marketingdive.com