As one of the top insurance providers in the U.S., State Farm (SF) wanted to drive interactive engagement, develop brand affinity, and secure new consumers through a groundbreaking interactive gaming experience for Millennials and Gen Zers.

Instead of focusing on the $1.38 billion esports market, State Farm purposefully targeted the all-encompassing $208 billion casual gaming market.

Previously, State Farm’s gaming efforts focused on sponsorship deals. In 2023, State Farm made the strategic and bold decision to move out of the sponsorship space and create a proprietary gaming tournament — the State Farm Gamerhood Challenge 2023 — a five-episode, all-things-gaming series where reality show met live gaming tournament.

The challenge was to create a fun, exciting, edutaining activation to explain something as abstract as insurance to a new and more fickle audience. State Farm needed to choose a message medium that would captivate a new audience.

Gamerhood Challenge 2023 was the world’s first all-things gaming tournament, featuring neighborhood games, mobile/video games and yard games to attract audiences of all three genres.

For mass viewership, SF partnered with 15 of Twitch and YouTube’s most-followed content creators (206M collective reach), including Ninja (Twitch’s 2022 most-followed channel), Ludwig (2022 Content Creator of the Year) and Typical Gamer (13.6M YouTube followers).

Inspired by a 1990s sitcom with its own jingle, each episode featured three gaming segments — neighborhood (like Charades), mobile/video (like Brawlhalla) and yard (like Paintball). Players were paired up to generate hilarious banter during the competition and on social.

Episode winners took on Jake from State Farm and a surprise guest — some of YouTube’s most popular creators — in yard games. Post-appearance, guests posted their respective episodes, leading to millions of additional views.

Teams competed for the giant Key to the Gamerhood and a donation

Most Millennials (94%) and Gen Zers (98%) have smartphones and engage on social platforms — 94%GZ, 90%M. They are heavily impacted by influencers — 72% follow at least one influencer; 82% trust influencers on purchasing decisions.

Millennials (80%) want to be entertained by brands, while 90% distrust traditional advertising practices.

Armed with this intelligence, SF devised a strategy to incorporate the audience’s love of gaming and their affinity for phones, social media and influencers.

Strategically connecting to the $208B casual gaming market, SF developed the world’s first all-things gaming tournament to resonate with audiences of three gaming genres — neighborhood games, mobile/video games and yard games.

With over 70% of gamers using multiple screens, SF built in an interactive component to generate further engagement.

For mass reach, SF picked two of the target audiences’ most popular platforms: Twitch and YouTube, incorporating gaming, streaming and

State Farm built the largest-ever physical gaming environment. It featured a 50,000-square-foot gaming neighborhood of eight custom-designed tiny homes where the YouTube and Twitch stars competed as teams and a Gamerhood park for yard games with Jake and each episode’s special guest. The gigantic production required 44 cameras, 175 staffers and 100+ screens.     

Using custom-built, remote-controlled devices, SF scheduled 63 insurable and non-insurable mishaps for players to navigate during mobile/video games, leading to incredible viewer engagement. Among the mishaps were high winds that caused tree leaves and debris to smash windows and fly through homes, a snowstorm that destroyed roofs and filled homes with snow and an appliance apocalypse that caused laundry landslides.

THE TARGETS:

SF set ambitious goals, rivaling some of gaming’s biggest tournaments:

10+ million total episode views for the 5-part series

1 billion brand impressions

251+ million reach on social media

Gamerhood Challenge 2023 blew past all of these and the industry’s expectations!

THE RESULTS:

An amazing 20M+ viewers watched Gamerhood Challenge on SF’s Twitch and YouTube channels, and players’ and streamers’ individual channels — more than double our goal.

Reached an incredible 534.5M people on social media — surpassing our target by 113%.

Achieved 100% positive sentiment.

Generated 1B+ earned media impressions.

Combined impressions from players, hosts, the live show, VODs, social media and earned media totaled an astounding 2B+.

Disrupted the game-streaming market, causing Twitch to change its policy and prohibit gamers from simulcasting on two platforms simultaneously.