With industry-leading internet speeds, up to 25x faster than cable internet providers, AT&T Fiber was introducing a higher speed internet service in the US, offering up to 5 GIGs of streaming speed - ideal for people with high data demands on their internet.
Our goal was to increase unaided and aided awareness metrics as well as consideration metrics for AT&T Fiber. To do this, we decided to show a crucial and highly relevant audience, gamers, exactly why those specs would matter for them.
The gaming audience is huge, but one that is historically skeptical of telecom companies. AT&T Fiber sought to reach and engage this audience specifically and authentically, making them aware of the capabilities of AT&T Fiber in a way that would resonate. Thankfully, to our advantage, gamers know the benefits of fiber optic connectivity more than any other mass audience segment. With increasingly-complex games that rely on instantaneous response time, as well as multi-screen streaming experiences, the gaming community requires streaming bandwidth that can meet their data demand.
We needed to partner with a platform that could perfectly engage, inspire and influence this target market.
Enter Twitch. At the very epicenter of gaming, Twitch has over 30M daily active users and extremely high engagement. Twitch streamers watch an average of 95 minutes of video per session.
Though users expect ads, the main Twitch audience (age 25-34) is still suspicious of marketing, particularly telecom companies, who they view as out of touch. Therefore, it was essential we show authentic, original content to achieve high engagement with streamers, linking the relevancy of our partnership to their own gaming success. This would work to encourage greater trust and awareness of AT&T Fiber within the gaming community.
To monetize their streaming platforms, Twitch ‘creators’ must achieve key milestones. They start as Streamers, then become Affiliates, then Partners, the most successful level. To reach Affiliate and begin to monetize their content, a creator must reach 500 minutes streaming on the service.
Though Twitch users are 65% male, emerging female voices are gaining traction with all audiences. The female viewing audience is growing too: 35% of Twitch users in 2022 are female (up from 18.5% in 2017).
We decided to partner with two female Twitch creators, BrookeAB (1.2M followers) and Bnans (598K followers) - rising stars who genuinely connect with the audience’s inherent passion for gaming. As AT&T Fiber users, BrookeAB and Bnans have direct knowledge of AT&T Fiber benefits, and could clearly communicate how it has helped evolve their gameplay.
Using subtle in-platform branding touches directly on each streaming video, our creators would emphasize the advantages of having 1 Gigabyte of symmetrical upload and download speeds, AT&T Fiber’s most pivotal streaming advantage.
Given that each of our Twitch partners use AT&T Fiber, the experience of their regularly scheduled gaming and conversation was connected to the brand and showed how our competitive advantages boosted their careers - something that many streamers and gamers aspire to.
Execution
Going live on Twitch with BrookeAB and Bnans, we let them revisit “The First 500“ minutes that they streamed on their journey to becoming a known Affiliate. While gaming and revisiting old videos, they spoke to the evolution of their connection, documenting how the upgrade to AT&T Fiber lets them “Game like a GIG-illion-aire.” This required reflection on their personal stories while maintaining engaging realtime personas.
To drive interest in each livestream, we set up high-impact locally-targeted takeovers and traffic drivers across Twitch & Amazon. This was essential to the consideration and conversion of the product, as AT&T Fiber is a local product with a national footprint. We ensured broadcast was available for everyone, but boosted it for audiences who might convert, leveraging our partnership in the most optimal way possible.
Within the stream, we leveraged Twitch’s picture-in-picture commentary feature, as BrookeAB and Bnans replayed past gameplay, noting differences and answering audience questions about how to level-up streaming setups. AT&T Fiber was the centerpiece of each story, as each Twitch partner was able to pinpoint the exact moment in their gaming careers that they achieved their optimal setup.
Our Twitch partnership drove mass awareness of AT&T Fiber’s offerings among a key audience segment.
Altogether, our streams with BrookeAB and Bnans tallied 2.14M total views, with over 5.4M total minutes watched. The chat remained lively, racking up over 7K messages, showing healthy engagement beyond our main awareness goal.
Pivotally, we broke through the skepticism around telecom brands among viewers age 25-34, realizing significant gains in mid and lower funnel metrics.
