It’s time that we, as a people, rise up and take control of Nature Man. And thankfully, Old Spice is the brand that is brave enough to make that happen.
Old Spice is teaming up with Twitch for a new kind of promotional event. Starting Thursday and running through next Saturday, the body odor-eliminating company’s Twitch channel will host The Old Spice Nature Adventure. This is a special marketing event that will let the people in Twitch’s chat control a person known simply as Nature Man. A livestreaming webcam will stay focused on this new hero as he gets involved in odd situations. These include run-ins with talking trees, arm-wrestling competitions with a human in a bear suit, and more. This is a new way for marketers to engage the video site’s gigantic audience.
Twitch, which is helping Old Spice with this event, said this is the first time a non-game brand was using its platform like this. But it’s not surprising that a company would try something like this. Twitch has more than 100 million viewers every month, and a huge chunk of those people are males between the ages of 13 and 34 years old. That’s a key demographic that has both disposable income and a tendency to stink really bad.
This is an evolution on the idea that started with Twitch Plays Pokémon. That is a channel that enables the chat room to control what happens in the classic Nintendo monster-collecting role-playing games. That idea spread to dozens of other games, and now developers are adding Twitch-chat functionality into their new releases from the start.
Of course, this is all really about informing you, the customer, about Old Spice’s new Fresher Collection of scented products. Which you can find in the personal-grooming section of your local grocery store.
Marketers are obviously seeing the potential in Twitch, and an event like this could engage that audience on a whole new level. It’s not just a commercial that people will ignore or block. And it’s not just some static video. It’s interactive and silly, and that’s something that Twitch viewers respond to when their watching their favorite streamers. And now, brands are hoping it will have a similar effect for them as well.