Mountain Dew, in a move to target younger consumers, is partnering with Twitch to reward gamers that include Mountain Dew products in their streams with — get this — exposure.
The stunt, called MTN DEW RAID, is powered by an artificial intelligence tool from production studio Unit9. Perhaps similar to how facial recognition works, it crawls all streams and identifies or locates the presence of Mountain Dew products and branding in streams using the #Gaming tag (but gamers on Reddit have been saying that it will accept anything that looks vaguely similar or is green). It then sends gamers an invitation to participate. Once they opt-in, the tool will lock into their stream (with their permission, at least).
The reward, which Mountain Dew boldly calls “prizes or perks” on its FAQ page, is “the chance to be featured on the MTN DEW Gaming Twitch Channel, the MTN DEW RAID branded shelf on the Twitch home page, and the Twitch homepage hero carousel. Streamers will also have a chance to receive a 1:1 coaching session with a professional streamer/content creator.”
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Streams will be monitored from December 6 to 8, and participating gamers who decide to forego the branding midway will be prompted by the AI to bring it back on camera. If they don’t, they’ll be removed from the list of participating streamers.
X user NearCyan points out the similarity to a 4chan post from over a decade ago that describes gamers of the future as people required to brand their activities by verifying with Mountain Dew and Doritos.
While the stunt obviously targets younger gamers looking to build their following and needing any sort of boost in exposure, streamers can’t help but criticize the fact that only Twitch will get financial gain from the marketing effort.
“Self promo is a problem in and of itself, but right now, it’s just basically a free ad running all over Twitch for a multinational corporation,” streamer ZachBussey wrote on Reddit, where he tested participating in the event. “Creators typically get paid a fraction of a penny per ad impression when running ads. In this case, only Twitch is being financially enriched to promote a product in creator communities.”
There’s also that problem of platforms partnering with brands to let them monitor users’ content without their consent.
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