Young people love entertainment and are willing to pay for great content. And they still love movies. But their entertainment consumption is geared more and more towards digital channels. So we need

to work extra hard to convince them that a trip out of their digital world into a real cinema is worth it, like the sequel to “Wreck-It Ralph”, “Ralph Breaks the Internet”, as we relied on a fun-loving target audience who would get the humour of the movie. Usually a trailer ad or sneak peek for an upcoming movie would do the job to tease the promise. But here’s the bad news: our young target audience is becoming unreachable with video content through traditional offline advertising ? and even digitally they are either using advertising-free streaming services or ad blockers to avoid the one thing we need to get to them: advertisement for our movie.

In the animated movie "Ralph Breaks the Internet", two friends accidentally travel to the place called "The Internet" for the first time and, due to their clumsiness they cause a lot of chaos. We combined these characteristics with our challenge to bypass ad-blockers: To let our young audience experience these chaotic effects firsthand, we featured the characters natively in the only place our target audience would not block out ? in a Twitch live stream and let them mess it up!

Despite streaming movies and series, our target audience has another passion point that is becoming even more relevant: online gaming. And they love live video streams, where their idols are playing their favorite video games online. In recent years, "Twitch" has become the go-to-platform for those live streams ? the ideal platform to engage and woo our young audience. Given, we find a way to avoid ad-blockers to let our creative idea be the entertaining experience that conveys what the movie is all about.

We partnered with of one of Germany's gaming idols, Lara Loft, and turned her Twitch stream into the playground of Ralph and his friend Vanellope for a live disruption. It all happened right in front of the eyes of the audience: the animated characters repeatedly "crashed" Lara's live stream, messing around with her profile, browsing through her hard drive and starting some of Lara's video files, including the trailer of the movie. Ralph also altered Lara’s alert jingle (the sound playing whenever new fans subscribe to Lara’s channel or donate her money, a paid interaction supported by the platform itself) to an infamous Rick Astley smash hit. Fans flocked to the live stream and marveled at the stunt, paying their tributes to get “rickrolled” again and again. We brought the unreachable, ad-blocking generation to voluntarily pay a financial contribution to a streamer, only because it was entertaining for them.

This seamless integration of the movie characters and trailer, emphasized by Lara humorously playing along with the chaotic troublemakers, turned advertising into a likeable experience for our ad blocking target audience: At the stream's peak, Lars's concurrent live viewership was 160% higher than her average concurrent viewership.

The altered subscription jingle resulted in a 216% increase in Lara’s average daily subscription. The Twitch-Chat comments during the Ralph disruption were overwhelmingly positive (69%), some were gameplay-related or neutral (27%), negative comments were very few and negligible (4%).

10% of these users even turned themselves into Ralph-ambassadors and promoted the action spontaneously outside of Twitch by calling their friends to vote for who they liked better - Ralph or Lara. Guess who almost won the poll despite Lara being the reason why people would watch the stream in the first place.