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Getty Images / Ross O’Donovan
Ross O’Donovan’s Twitch stream was targeted by a Burger King campaign
It’s the fame we did not expect: Twitch Streamers vs Burger King.
And, just like a flamegrilled burger, it gets heated.
It has everything to do with an advertising campaign that the fast food chain has explained that streamers have accused of being ‘scummy’ and exploitative.
They are very vocal about it here online.
Burger King, on the other hand, remains silent – and has not responded to our requests for a statement.
The whole thing revolves around a bot on Twitch that reads messages from fans during a stream.
It is designed so that viewers, in exchange for a small donation, can ask their favorite streamers questions or comment on how they play.
Burger King, however, has used it to advertise their latest offerings.
It means the exhibition has received that would have cost thousands of pounds for as little as £ 2.50.
“This is not good”
“When it first happened, I thought it was a joke,” Ross O’Donovan told Radio 1 Newsbeat.
He has hundreds of thousands of followers on his Twitch channel RubberNinja.
Ross was live earlier this year when a user King of Stream called donated $ 5 (£ 3.80), but – instead of a typical fan message – the bot started reading the Burger King deals.
“We follow general protocol when it comes to doing ads. You have to make it public for your viewers,” Ross says.
“It costs a lot more than $ 5 for a company to partner with a streamer, so it’s just very tricky to turn that whole thing around and do it through a donation.”
Burger King has since released a promotional video, via advertising company Ogilvy, that does the same thing that happens to other streamers whose faces are blurred and voices changed.
In the video, the company says it turned “donations into ads” by “starving streamers and viewers”.
But Ross says the campaign is a slap in the face for streamers who rely on real-time sponsorship deals to make their living.
“We work really hard to try to entertain our audience and to capture our streams like that is just unethical.
“It’s not fair and I hope they use this as a study to show marketing students in the future what’s OK and what’s not OK, because this was definitely not.”
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Take a quick scroll through Twitter and you may find many other stream names with big names who are not satisfied.
“A lot of streamers are really angry about this, because normally companies go through an advertising agency. You talk to them and you make a deal,” Ross adds.
“Then, importantly, you tell your viewers that you’re doing an ad.
“That for Burger King essentially doing guerrilla warfare puts us in a strange place because we do not reveal to our viewers that it is an advertisement – because we did not know.”
We contacted Burger King, Ogilvy and Twitch for a comment, but none of them came back to us for publication.
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