The Bloodless Battle was a Genentech-branded Twitch event. It was a live video game tournament that combined pure entertainment (professional-level gameplay, play by play announcers, a celebrity magician) with education and community building (panels where gamers with hemophilia discussed their experience with the disease and connected with each other.)

Hemophilia is a rare bleeding disorder. For people with the condition, a small injury can result in bleeds that may lead to joint damage and chronic pain. Only 20% of people with this condition are highly active in the community (seeking out information about hemophilia, going to disease-specific events, and identifying as hemophiliacs online).

We wanted to engage the other 80% and partner with the community as a whole to further discussions and connections around this rare bleeding disorder.

The Bloodless Battle was a custom tournament on Twitch Rivals, one of the biggest events in all of e-sports. The creative idea was to remove the blood from one of the most popular video games.

A tournament held in “bloodless mode” made the event unique for people with hemophilia (who spend their lives avoiding bleeds). During the Bloodless Battle, gamers with hemophilia got the opportunity to go head-to-head against esport celebrities.

The tournament was facilitated by celebrity host Justin Willman (comedian and magician from Netflix’s Magic for Humans). Fans watched their favorite video game in rare, bloodless form, while learning about a rare blood disorder. Segments called “Bloodless Babble” allowed for connection and education, providing a forum for gamers with hemophilia to talk openly about their experience with the condition.

We needed to define an engagement strategy to reach the 80% with hemophilia who weren't being reached by current efforts. The usual channels and communications healthcare leans on, wouldn't make an impact.

So we began to map the non-health related affinities of our audience (males 18-29), using proprietary social listening tools to uncover non-health related topics being discussed among users who also self-identified as living with hemophilia. Gaming was a frequently mentioned topic. To reach gamers, we needed to fit into their interests, the only question was where and how.

Research showed the most frequented channels for a young, male, gamer audience were on Twitch - boasting a user base of 18MM unique daily users, of which 48% were males 18-34 years old. While Twitch is a platform of thousands of varied channels, the most visible and frequented program is Twitch Rivals.

The creative challenge: Incorporate hemophilia into Twitch Rivals.

We understood that our audience was not engaging with (or responding to) typical pharma/healthcare advertising and programming, so it was essential that our content fit organically within the unique gaming culture of Twitch.

We researched and communicated with Twitch and gamers with hemophilia over the course of a year to ensure that we were being authentic to the community. We became well-versed in the terms, emotes, and expressions that were endemic to this gaming community (being aware of the delicate balance between being authentically ingrained in the world of Twitch and being a brand that seems out of place.)

We interviewed gamers with hemophilia and discovered the importance of camaraderie through competition and their affinity to specific video games over others. To help the program maintain a strong connection with Genentech, we enlisted Justin Willman, a known figure within the hemophilia community and host of Genentech’s Challenge Accepted web series.

The Bloodless Battle was viewed by 1.6MM unique viewers on Twitch, peaking at 69k concurrent viewers. There were over 9,000 chat messages, creating an organic conversation among people with hemophilia, friends and family of people with the condition, and the gaming community at-large.

The Bloodless Battle drove a 5x increase in unique traffic to the Genentech Hemophilia website. Post-program surveys demonstrated an increased perception of Genentech as an innovative pharmaceutical company that centers its work on the patients they serve.

The Bloodless Battle was created by a US biopharmaceutical company. It was subject to review by internal medical/legal/regulatory teams at Genentech and subject to approval by Twitch.

Genentech also needed to be mindful of not inadvertently crossing the line into FDA regulated product promotion.

The target audience was young men living with hemophilia, a rare bleeding disorder. People with hemophilia often need to avoid activities that can cause physical injury (as this can result in bleeds that may lead to joint damage and chronic pain). Research confirmed that this population over-indexes as video gamers.