#MARKiesAwards 2021 highlight: AMD's banded online show powers gaming laptops push

The global pandemic has seen the surge of livestreaming as many countries were issued a lockdown order, seeing growth of almost 78% in 2020 and is even expected to hit US$100 billion by 2023. As such, semiconductor and computer processor developer company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and agency Eliphant, took a shot at riding along the livestreaming wave, reeling in the gold award for Most Effective Use of Specific Audience at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s MARKie’s Award 2021. Find out how the company managed to impress our judges through a completely virtual campaign.

Challenge

AMD’s was on the lookout for ways to engage multiple markets and drive both brand awareness and its association with high-performance gaming hardware among gamers in Asia. The brand wanted to make a strong, positive impression for a product that is traditionally focused on the white box, DIY market, and promote it in a way that engaged gamers in an authentic and entertaining way.

With many gamers staying home and consuming more content online, together with video games events, marketing and esports company Eliphant, the AMD Streamer Challenge was conceived to create an AMD-branded online show. The brand hoped to provide fun content for gamers to consume, and also engage members of the community to participate and win prizes while playing with their favourite streamers.

Strategy

The idea was to leverage the popularity of gaming and esports to showcase the high-performance capabilities of AMD-powered gaming laptops. According to the brand, the selected games and participating streamers would lead the campaign as a way to connect with the audience in a more organic and authentic manner, thus building AMD’s brand association with high-performance gaming among the gaming community. Gaming streamers from various SEA countries were recruited for the campaign and each equipped with an AMD-powered gaming laptop manufactured by campaign partners Acer or HP.

AMD said that to maximise the reach of the campaign, three popular games of 2020 were selected for the campaign, as different genres of games would appeal to different subsets of the gaming community. In order to further engage with the gaming community, each streamer was required to recruit teammates from among their fan bases, and compete as a team against other teams in each livestream episode.

With the AMD Streamer Challenge, the company decided to target the gaming community in key Asian markets – male and female PC gamers aged 16 to 35.

They were chosen as the target audience due to their digital native nature and the fact that they spend a large portion of their time online, browsing social media or consuming gaming content on popular video and livestreaming platforms such as YouTube and Twitch.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the campaign was designed for viewers and players to participate from the comfort of home. AMD elaborated that the campaign concept leveraged on its deep understanding of the target audience’s psyche and behavioural habits, focusing on creating content that they could relate to while ensuring brand and product placements were prominent and yet not perceived as being too “hard sell”.

Having a virtual campaign was also well suited to the target audience of online gamers. Audiences were able to sign up to play via the campaign’s website, where they could also learn more about the brand and the products each streamer was using for the campaign challenges.

The concept for campaign creatives was to have the AMD Streamer Challenge led by the colourful personalities of the participating streamers, while appealing to fans and players of the three featured games. A bespoke logo was created for the campaign, with the long term goal of building it up as a recognisable brand within the gaming community. Taking inspiration from AMD and its processor brand Ryzen’s brand colours, the campaign design was conceptualised to be easily associated with the parent AMD brand while catering to gamer preference for colour and layouts.

Execution

The AMD Streamer Challenge was rolled out consistently across all aspects of the campaign, including the campaign site, streamer posts, livestream broadcast overlays, and ad creatives. The brand said that it identified the top social platforms across the target countries, and focused marketing and media buys on Facebook, Instagram, GoogleDisplay Network, YouTube and Twitter (Japan only).

It also secured a partnership with Twitch to feature the livestreamed episodes on prominent placements within the platform to drive higher discoverability and viewership. Each episode was broadcast live on Twitch, and uploaded to YouTube and the campaign microsite as free to watch videos-on-demand (VODs). The campaign series ran for a total of 11 episodes on Friday evenings from September to December 2020. AMD said that Friday evenings were ideal as most large scale gaming and esports events happen on weekends, and broadcasting on Friday evenings would avoid competing for viewership with a large event broadcast.

The campaign’s media buy strategy focused on driving awareness and viewership of each of the AMD Streamer Challenge episodes, during which AMD, HP, Acer and sponsors EPOS and Secretlab received prominent product placements and shoutouts from episode hosts. Video ads were also played between segments during each broadcast.

To appeal to different gaming communities, three popular games of different genres were selected - Valorant, DOTA 2 and Fall Guys. Valorant was chosen for the competitive gaming audience, Fall Guys for the casuals and DOTA2 due to its massive popularity, with extremely high viewership numbers globally. Sponsors EPOS and Secretlab were brought on board to provide prizes such as gaming headsets and ergonomic gaming chairs. Pro DOTA2 esports team, Fnatic, also made guest appearances on three episodes to participate in challenges with Fnatic fans for additional star power.

In order to further engage with the gaming community, each streamer was required to recruit teammates from their fan bases, and compete as a team of three or five against the other country teams in each episode. According to AMD, this engagement tactic provided a rare chance for fans to interact with and play with their favourite streamers, especially so for the Fnatic fans. Incorporating fan participation in each episode also allowed for deeper community engagement, said AMD.

Streamers also livestreamed their own point of view on their personal channels, giving fans a peek behind the scenes and allowing them to send in real-time comments. The campaign microsite served also as the main portal for information dissemination regarding the campaign. Audiences could tune in to the livestreams embedded on the site, or catch VODs of each episode after it aired. All content was in English and localised to Japan, Korean, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia in order to reach local audiences in their native languages. The campaign was announced via press release to gaming media and on AMD's local social channels. Participating streamers also made announcements on their channels.

Results

Overall, the campaign achieved a total of about 25 million impressions across all platforms and 3.3 million views on Twitch and YouTube, which exceeded the set campaign targets of about 15 million impressions and one million views respectively. The campaign’s trailer alone garnered approximately 2.3 million views over the course of the campaign, making it the most viewed video on AMD’s global YouTube channel as of 31 December 2020. Based on the results, the brand said that gaming content resonates very well with not only gamers, but also AMD’s existing consumer base.

AMD concluded that the partnership with Twitch proved to be a significant driver of viewership due to the high visibility placements on the platform’s home page. Despite a much lower marketing budget for Singapore, Singapore showed strong results and achieved viewership of almost 23% of the original one million viewership target for the seven markets. AMD also added that the campaign gained good traction, and led to TikTok’s strategic gaming team approaching AMD to explore live streaming the final episode on its platform. The stream saw good viewership and response, which has paved the way for further collaboration between the two companies.

The brand shared that the post-campaign feedback from Acer, HP, EPOS and Secretlab have all been positive, and discussions for an expanded version of the AMD Streamer Challenge is being planned for 2021.AMD also said that the results of the campaign exceeded all expectations, and drew the attention of AMD's global management as a best practice case study. The campaign’s success also paved the way for AMD to continue exploring gaming and esports to reach and connect with gamers in Asia and globally.