UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Advertising on the internet is still in its "Wild West" phase where regulations are limited, and existing rules like age requirements are hard to enforce. This lack of standards led researchers in Penn State’s Department of Nutritional Sciences to study whether advertisements for fast food on the streaming platform Twitch might be influencing viewers in ways that were poorly understood.
New research, led by an undergraduate student, revealed that a fast food restaurant's advertising campaign had a significant impact on how often Twitch viewers engaged with the brand and increased the number of positive mentions of the brand during and following the advertising campaign.
Twitch is an extremely popular streaming platform that allows viewers to communicate using a chat function while sharing a common video feed. During 2021, an average of 2.78 million people were viewing streams on Twitch at any given moment. By comparison, that is more than any television channel outside the four major networks and exceeded the number of viewers watching ESPN or Fox News. Though Twitch includes a broad range of topics across its channels — including travel, sports, and food — streaming and watching video game play is by far the most common use of the platform.
"There are a large number of young people who spend much of their leisure time on Twitch, and advertising for unhealthy foods like candy, energy drinks and fast food are very common on the platform," said Travis Masterson, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at Penn State and co-author of this research. "On top of that, the advertising that is possible on Twitch can have more components and be more interactive. Researchers really need to understand if and how these advertisements affect people differently than traditional ads."
In December 2020, a national fast-food restaurant chain conducted the five-day advertising campaign on Twitch. During the campaign, the chain partnered with five popular video-game streamers, where each streamer designed their own meal which was temporarily available at the chain's franchises across the nation. Advertisements for the chain were displayed on each streamer’s Twitch channel and throughout their video game play.
Additionally, the streamers ordered and consumed their custom meal while streaming and discussed the restaurant chain with their viewers. Some streamers specifically encouraged engagement with the brand; for example, one encouraged followers to type the name of the restaurant chain in the chat. Many viewers complied, leading to a simple but potentially impactful interaction with the brand. This type of multi-component advertising is not possible in most social media or online environments, and its effects are little understood, according to Masterson.
In order to investigate how the campaign affected the way that people interacted with the brand, Keally Haushalter, a graduate student at the University of Texas who conducted the research as an undergraduate student majoring in nutritional sciences at Penn State with her mentor Masterson, decided to track all the mentions in these Twitch channels of the chain's name for five-days prior to the campaign, during the five days of the campaign, and for a five-day period after the campaign. Haushalter scraped data for every mention of the chain in the streams’ chats, which are open to all viewers.
Results of the study were published in the journal Public Health Nutrition. The researchers collected more than 85,000 mentions of the restaurant chain over those 15 days, with more than 50,000 mentions during the campaign itself. Engagement with the brand increased by more than 300% during the campaign, and engagement remained 8% higher the week after the campaign than it had been before the campaign.
Viewers’ engagement with the brand also became more positive. The researchers coded each interaction as either being positive (e.g., “I love eating [restaurant's name] food”), neutral (e.g., simply posting the restaurant's name), or negative (e.g., “I got food poisoning from [restaurant's name]"). They found that most messages were neutral, but that the number of negative messages decreased after the campaign compared to before.
“This research shows that advertising on Twitch is not only prevalent, but it also drives engagement,” Haushalter said. “We also saw that it improved the attitude people expressed towards the restaurant in chats. These campaigns are unregulated and appear to be highly effective. This research is important to understand the impact of advertising on Twitch and other emergent platforms.”
Masterson agreed and stressed that viewers of Twitch streams should be mindful of the advertising messages they receive if they want to remain aware of what may be influencing their dietary decision-making.