Every day, gamers around the world tune-in to Twitch to watch their favorite influencers play live for hours on end. These influencers have become trusted voices in the games community, and an influencer’s opinion often holds more weight than industry reviews.

We tapped into the swaying power of these Twitch influencers, choosing 3 of their most respected Call of Duty (COD) players to communicate our Game Fuel messaging. We generated excitement and awareness of the program by leveraging these influencers and their popular live streams to drive their hundreds of thousands of fans to participate and watch an exciting, first of its kind event where they’d have the unforgettable opportunity to actually play alongside their favorite COD influencer and, building off Dew’s recent sponsorship announcement, NBA player, many of whom are publicly acknowledged COD fans.

Mountain Dew hosted a live 2-hour COD Pro-Am where fans could play alongside 3 of Twitch’s top Call of Duty influencers. To charge this further, we leveraged Dew’s new NBA sponsorship and became the first to host a live streamed gaming event inside an NBA locker room--inviting 2 NBA players, long-time COD gamers Mike Conley and Courtney Lee to play as well!

Before the event, fans were challenged to redeem as many codes as possible. The more firepower unlocked, the greater the chance of survival meaning longer playtime with our celebrities.

We leveraged our influencers’ popular live streams in the months leading up to the event to promote the event and redemption challenge. Each week they walked their hundreds of thousands of fans through the redemption process – showing just how easy it was to earn double firepower.

Live influencer walkthroughs, run in tandem with targeted digital media across Twitch, drove fans to unlock 550K minutes (over a year’s worth!) of increased fire power. In addition, influencer and celebrity social call-outs earned more than 7.45MM impressions across social channels.

The Pro-Am garnered over 250K views, which was 17k more than Twitch’s next top performing branded event ever. In between games, fans engaged our stars in conversation, resulting in over 50K chat comments, questions, and even inventive side challenges.

As the Game Fuel campaign was tied directly to sales, our exciting Pro-Am event helped push Dew Trademark ROI into positive territory for the year, exceeding volume projections by 11%. At the end of the campaign, fans had watched over 1.2M minutes of custom Game Fuel content and redeemed more than 18K codes.