Burger King advertiser abuses twitch donation system

[Teddy07]

Streamers have gotten very entitled. They are just pissed that they did not get a sweet sponsorship.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Brilliant 

 

 

On 8/22/2020 at 10:34 AM, Soppro said:

I'm sure many of them would have accepted them had they known about it ..

Oh no, none of them would have accepted $5 for passing on an ad, I can tell you that much...

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Have to love the ingenuity of BK. I am surprised nobody thought of it sooner. 

In this specific case I like to think everyone else would have realized how cringe something like this is (nor do I think it was likely to be the first time it happened) 

[Ein0r]

Sign me up for a program where I go channel-hopping for some time making promotional donations with money I don't own, while also getting paid for it.

 

I also wanted to make a comparison to the early days of Let's Play videos, with youtubers monetising content they theoretically didn't have the rights for, but I ultimately can't make it work.

 

Would opening the flood gates to that behaviour just harm the streamers and the whole concept of streaming in the end?

When I watch streams then I also read the chat, because the streamer or his content alone are not enough to keep me engaged. Especially not with a distraction like chat on the side. And not many streamers are capable enough to make me ignore chat and only focus on the content. Donations never really bothered me. But knowing that the next donation could just be an ad and not bye a supporting fan is off-putting; or annoying at least. I don't know if I will get used to that or if I will just stop engaging with chat.

 

And as I wrote earlier, not engaging with chat also means dropping several semi-interesting streamers, or streamers that incorporated their successful interaction with chat into their content and who flourish because of that. 

 

Maybe it is mainly aimed at streams that have a scrolling chat on the stream and those that text-to-speech plugins to automatically read fan donations.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

In this specific case I like to think everyone else would have realized how cringe something like this is (nor do I think it was likely to be the first time it happened) 

I think "cringe" is the wrong word. Nothing cringy about this. I think it's quite immoral and shady, but at the same time brilliant marketing.

 

 

1 hour ago, VegetableStu said:

imagine ads for stuff you don't believe in or agree to

At least one of the streamers were actually pissed that Burger King used a donation rather than give him a sponsor contract. So at least some of the streamers would have had no issue with being sponsored by Burger King. They are just announced that they didn't get paid as much as they believe they should have, to have Burger King ads on their stream. But at the same time, they are the ones who said "yeah, a message read out loud on my stream is worth this much".

 

Also, wasn't a major argument from content creator's side during the Adpocalypse that "brands are stupid for not wanting their ads running on videos they don't agree with. People can tell that a pre-roll ad from company X is not a direct endorsement of the video content".

I kinda like how the tables have turned now.

Companies removing ads from Youtube? Content creators are pissed because "brands shouldn't care about what videos their ads are played on".

Companies pushing ads into content creators' videos? "Baww what if it was a brand I didn't like that advertised on my videos?".

 

I think in the end it all comes down to money. Burger King found a way to get a lot of exposure without giving streamers as much money as streamers want, and that's why they are pissed.

[Vanderburg]

9 hours ago, AdmiralMeowmix said:

Issue: $5 is not worth advertising a company. A normal deal for advertising even just once is a few thousand dollars. Hell for prolonged exposure if the company is not going through some agency it can be upwards of $20,000. If an agency is involved said agency tends to take a 90+% cut of the money and only give the creators a small amount of a few hundred to a few grand.

 

What BK did is forcibly advertise themselves basically for nothing. Exploiting content creators and using them as advertisers for their brand WITHOUT PROPER COMPENSATION. Not to mention IT DID NOT MENTION IT WAS AN AD. Which is an FTC Violation and can get these streamers into legal trouble that could end their career temporarily as they deal with the legal drawbacks. Luckily that didn't happen and BK/the Agency came out about it and will likely face FTC guidelines trouble for not discolosing what they were doing was an advertisement campaign when they did it and not informing said streamers of said campaign

This is a lazy answer. Either the streamer endorses everything that shows up on the stream, by screening the donations and only allowing certain ones, or he accepts everything that shows up. It's their own fault they didn't consider that someone might use it to advertise and it was on them to put in place any kind of filter for it. "That's not fair!" and "I didn't realize that might happen!" is a poor excuse. This is harmless, it's funny, and it's exceptionally clever, and perfectly within the system set up by the streamers themselves.

 

The streamers should just go "Ah, that was smart..." and them implement some system for preventing it in the future.

[spartaman64]

15 minutes ago, Vanderburg said:

This is a lazy answer. Either the streamer endorses everything that shows up on the stream, by screening the donations and only allowing certain ones, or he accepts everything that shows up. It's their own fault they didn't consider that someone might use it to advertise and it was on them to put in place any kind of filter for it. "That's not fair!" and "I didn't realize that might happen!" is a poor excuse. This is harmless, it's funny, and it's exceptionally clever, and perfectly within the system set up by the streamers themselves.

 

The streamers should just go "Ah, that was smart..." and them implement some system for preventing it in the future.

so streamers are expected to go through a list of all the brand names that ever existed and blacklist all of them

[StDragon]

You just advertised for BK, because now i"m hungry for their chicken sandwich. 

[Vanderburg]

1 hour ago, spartaman64 said:

so streamers are expected to go through a list of all the brand names that ever existed and blacklist all of them

Or screen their donations. If they allow everything to post a message, then they are allowing advertisers to take advantage of it. If they want to restrict messages, then they have to screen/approve them as they come in. Either donators can post what they want, or they can't, and if they can't, that's how you enforce it. The alternative is to just now allow people to have their message come up on screen. The advertisers are playing within the rules.

[Touch My Hamm]

This creates a weird paradigm between streamer and advertisers. I would assume that advertisers sponsoring streams/videos it should ALWAYS be visible who is sponsoring and that its known by the viewers. I do not see why streamers would be mad getting donations...Since they are getting paid and they are the ones with text to speech on. My objection would be if they start donating multiple times to a single stream, lets say $50 an hour every-hour for 8 hours to 1 person. This to me would be the same as sponsoring the content.

 

Most likely this was a advertising stunt that we are all now talking about. Might not happen again or have the changes I am talking about and it could be a once in a blue moon thing....

[SpaceGhostC2C]

58 minutes ago, Vanderburg said:

 The advertisers are playing within the rules.

I think the only caveat with that statement is the "disclosing content as advertisement" part. Then again, if the streamer realized and said out loud what was happening, then the disclosure did take place, so that wouldn't be an issue... 

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, Hakemon said:

This doesn't surprise me honestly.  Something is wrong with the management of BK here and it doesn't stop here.

My local BK franchise has been doing a scam and were recently caught pocketing extra cash and corporate did nothing when I initially reported it.  Recently the police shut them down for the very thing I reported.............the cheese incident.

Let me explain.  The local franchise would constantly not put cheese on your burger when you ask for it.  It was becoming a local running joke, "don't go to that branch if you want cheese!".  Turns out, the manager charged for cheese, and knew if you were "to go" they would purposely not put the cheese on, pocket the extra cash in hopes that you don't either check, or that you don't bother to come back.  I reported this twice, a year apart after it wasn't dealt with since it started seeming intentional a year ago.  Well, this year police shut them down and is pending investigation on the owner of this store.  Apparently they claimed corporate said to?  (I don't know if it's true or not but now with this BK ad abuse, I am NOT surprised at all).

 

Bk did not do this. The ad company Bk paid to advertise their brand came up with and implemented this. Big difference there.

 

1 hour ago, Vanderburg said:

Or screen their donations. If they allow everything to post a message, then they are allowing advertisers to take advantage of it. If they want to restrict messages, then they have to screen/approve them as they come in. Either donators can post what they want, or they can't, and if they can't, that's how you enforce it. The alternative is to just now allow people to have their message come up on screen. The advertisers are playing within the rules.

 

One problem with that line of reasoning. Most streamers aren't big enough to have a dedicated staff for screening that kind of thing. I'd also point out that with any offline advertising the advertiser isn't allowed to post what they want when they want where they want willy nilly.

 

There's also the completely valid question of weather the streamers are being adequately compensated for the exposure their stream gives the brand that is being advertised. Sponsorship deals exist for a big reason, (and in turn those same sponsors for those that have them are really no going to be happy if their rivals are getting cheap advertising with their streamer), and in turn those sponsorship deals establish somthing of a baseline going rate for the endorsement.

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

Also, wasn't a major argument from content creator's side during the Adpocalypse that "brands are stupid for not wanting their ads running on videos they don't agree with. People can tell that a pre-roll ad from company X is not a direct endorsement of the video content".

 

Nah, the problem with ads, in virtually all cases is that it's run by algorithms that are stupid. eg "this video about GAMES has 10 Million views! Want to advertise on it for $10?" When really these in-video sponsorship like how LTT and Gamers Nexus does theirs are actually the advertiser reaching out to them for a paid sponsorship and isn't some pittance like google ads are. Google scroogled themselves by running the advertisement revenue into the ground by having their algorithms do all the work and advertise stuff people neither wanted nor were interested in on content that the algorithm matched.

 

Like I kid you not, the amount of time required just to setup an ad campaign is ridiculous, and if I wanted to advertise explicitly on one site or page, it requires a lot of "hey this isn't a good way to reach your customers" type of nonsense algorithm pushback by Google. Well I'm sorry, but having seen both sides of the google ads dealing, google is being ridiculous. I'd rather spend $100 to get an ad on exactly one page/site/video than have google throw that ad on 1000 different sites or videos with only 1 person clicking on it over 1 million impressions. Google owns this mess they made.

 

The irony is that if a "big brand" actually did this kind of spam in a MMORPG they would be thrown out and banned within 90 seconds. Because only scammers do this kind of crap.

[rcmaehl]

nvm twitter was just acting up

[Shreyas1]

16 hours ago, Teddy07 said:

Streamers have gotten very entitled. They are just pissed that they did not get a sweet sponsorship.

Until every company realizes how much they can save in ad costs by doing this and literally every stream's quality goes down because every 5 seconds there's a text-to-speech ad playing 

[Teddy07]

6 hours ago, Shreyas1 said:

Until every company realizes how much they can save in ad costs by doing this and literally every stream's quality goes down because every 5 seconds there's a text-to-speech ad playing 

Yes, but I think it is already the case with streamers who have a thousand or more viewers. I can´t watch them anymore because it is too annoying but that is only my preference.

[DildorTheDecent]

Pretty neat idea. Burger King is shit tho.