With restaurants closed and everyone stuck at home, there was a rapid rise in demand for fast food delivery in the UK during lockdown. Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats were facing off in a highly competitive market. With choices usually driven by price or restaurant, delivery services have to find an original way to stand out – so when cravings hit, people default to your service over the competition.

To date, Uber Eats had focused their social activity on promotions and partners, rather than creating an emotional, culturally relevant connection with their audience. So they needed to leverage their attributions to increase brand affinity and become the first choice for food delivery.

The objective was simple: differentiate from other fast food retailers and increase brand love and engagement on social to maintain Top of Mind Awareness during a time when more people than ever were at home ordering food.

We wanted to reward the efforts of the small, lonely, (not to mention hungry) Twitch streamers who don’t get any of the support, love or recognition that the big streamers do. So, we enlisted two of Twitch's biggest gaming stars to help us do just that. Using the platform’s innovative ‘Raid’ functionality (where all your hard-earned viewers are directed to another stream), streamers with zero viewers were suddenly opened up to thousands.

These 15 lucky streamers received a brand experience like no other; with free vouchers for Uber Eats, floods of messages in their chats, heaps of viewers on the stream and their follower goals smashed in seconds. The excitement and joy was unparalleled and we delivered a feeling that money can’t buy; as well as tasty food.

Since lockdown began, streaming on Twitch saw a rapid surge in growth. Millions flocked to Twitch with viewership up 54.1% in 2020 (Twitch). The fast food delivery market had also got competitive (Food delivery giants battle: Rapid surge in demand during COVID - This is Money).

UK gamers are keen food delivery advocates; The Grocer reports 35% of UK gamers buy food and drink specifically to play video games. This figure rises to as much as 55% for gamers aged 18-24. (The Grocer)

Uber Eats used this insight to successfully talk to a hyper-engaged audience when the world was feeling particularly isolated.

Uber Eats wanted to tap into the native behaviours of the Twitch community, putting the brand right at the heart of it. Many brands have tried and failed at engaging this audience, so we needed to understand the platform, its users and their culture to successfully #BringIt.

Our dream was to take over the live streaming platform Twitch on launch day to deliver food and followers to unsuspecting streamers. We had to be best in class on the platform, using the hottest gamers, the latest audience behaviours and the many USP’s in the platform's functionality to gain that competitive advantage.

Our influencers hosted two 120 minute streams on their channels and used Twitch’s unique Raids feature; giving each small streamer thousands of followers, an Uber Eats voucher code to redeem and recognition from their heroes.

We took over Twitch’s homepage with a Uber Eats ad takeover that drove viewers to the streams, created custom Emotes (emojis) to accompany the campaign and drive further engagement. We also made use of Twitch’s unique highlights functionality to drive repeat views of the campaigns best bits. The campaign featured on Manny and Miniminter’s other social channels to drive further reach.

People actually cried from our ads. This campaign delivered a level of brand love we’ve never seen before.

15 unsuspecting streamers were delivered food and followers when they needed it most.

70,000 people talked about the campaign on social, yes that’s uses of #BringIt.

The campaign reached over 4 million people on Twitch.

All of our Uber Eats #BringIt voucher codes were snapped up within seconds.

Twitch said: “We've never seen a brand hack social behaviours so meaningfully and effectively on Twitch before. GG Uber Eats (meaning good game in Twitch language).”

Our goal was to stand out in a competitive market. Gaining close to 4 million views on the #BringIt content brought Uber Eats to the top of many minds in the Twitch community.