The Drum sits down with the Amazon streaming service’s marketing boss, Rachel Delphin, to talk about its push for new content types, welcoming an ‘influx’ of brands and a redoubled focus on community.
The pain spilled over to the start of 2024 when Twitch announced 500 further redundancies amid reports it remained unprofitable, almost a decade after its acquisition by Amazon. Just this summer, the Wall Street Journal wrote that the platform is “still losing money” despite advertising receipts of over $2bn last year. Workers reportedly anticipate yet further lay-offs.
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The ‘creator marketing’ streamer
A run of news stories like that would be troubling for any brand and doubly so for Twitch, which is arguably the streaming platform most reliant on community confidence. For a channel whose programming is almost entirely creator-led and community-supported, spooking the community is a serious risk. It should come as no surprise, then, that when The Drum sits down with chief marketing officer Rachel Delphin, the watchwords for the streamer’s current strategy are “community” and “trust.”
“The job is creator marketing,” says Delphin, in part because of the realities of the role that the platform plays in the wider social ecosystem. Viewers tend to discover Twitch creators off-platform and follow them to Twitch (“with high intention”), so marketing and supporting those streamers is central to marketing the platform – “kind of like a streaming service that promotes content instead of the brand… we’re a bit like a house of brands in that way, so a lot of our focus is on enabling, empowering and informing streamers.”
She continues: “We reach viewers when creators are effective. When they’re growing, when they’re inspired, they bring other creators in. Creators bring viewers in. That’s the job in a nutshell.”
A streaming-influencer marketing channel?
The wider streaming wars are hotting up, with providers increasing prices, consolidating offerings and grappling for increased ad revenues across the board. Earlier this year, new Twitch chief executive Dan Clancy argued that it’s those major streamers – especially Netflix – that are its main competitors, rather than other more social apps, such as TikTok, or gaming streamers such as YouTube. Why? Because viewers spend TV-style amounts of time watching Twitch.
It’s the “community” aspect of Twitch viewership that Clancy and Delphin think can set the platform apart from those competitors. When Delphin talks about “creator marketing,” she’s positioning Twitch as the natural home for a kind of two-way relationship between creator and viewer that leads to levels of fierce loyalty and devotion that, she argues, should be incredibly attractive to potential partners looking for deep, “authentic advocacy.” The pitch to brands is simple: the deeper an audience’s connection to a piece of media, the stronger the media buy into that piece of media – and nowhere is that connection stronger than in a Twitch stream, where viewers and creators form genuine two-way bonds.
While so much digital media is laser-focused on performance, then, Delphin is happy to think of Twitch as a channel for developing brand. “You get a chance to spend time. It’s not necessarily about driving a direct result – click-through or selling a product or sign-ups or whatever. It’s about making an impression on a hard-to-reach demographic, demonstrating values, demonstrating creativity, whatever the pillars of your brand are, doing it in a way that feels very authentic to the brand and leaving an impression on people who have a lot of purchasing power.”
Scaling the community
If community is the core of the platform’s offer to consumers, the promise to advertisers (and shareholders) is that Twitch can continue to scale the commercial opportunities around engaging with those communities. One boon came this year when Amazon Prime Video started its slow global roll-out of in-show advertising; now, you can buy Twitch media as part of a cross-service Amazon buy that will introduce the platform to new brands.
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The other play here is to expand beyond Twitch’s gaming roots. The platform has been busy launching new streaming categories all year, from the gaming-adjacent, such as miniature model-making, to the semi-established, such as DJing, as well as brave new worlds, such as ‘co-working,’ where viewers will sync their work cycles with a streamer quietly getting their business done. ‘Just chatting’ has already long been the most popular category.
Continuing beyond gaming, the platform surely hopes, will continue to attract more advertisers as well as more viewers. “There’s room for everyone,” Delphin says. “It’s not a big pie. And more different types of content bring in different segments of people who have maybe not been exposed through gaming but are very into cooking or very into science or whatever, which is beneficial to the whole Twitch community… DJs are a great example, where you have a real influx of brands that have shown a lot of interest, because it falls right within their service, their product or their audience segment.”
