Alienware and Twitch, two well-known brands among the gaming set, have collaborated on an interactive, sci-fi activation taking place in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal this week, October 27–31. The goal of the alien-themed pop-up, dubbed “The Artifact,” is to introduce the general public to the gaming brands while also providing a heightened experience for digital visitors via nightly Twitch streams.
The way to achieve this, according to the executives behind the activation, was to create a hybrid experience that entertains both commuter traffic in real life and digital visitors on Twitch.
At the physical activation, teams of three players work together on a game featuring symbol matching, sight and sound cues, and other fast-paced puzzles that test reaction time. And during the evenings, popular streamers will run challenges for Twitch viewers that help “stabilize the portal” in real time, which include solving riddles, trivia, in-game missions and other gameplay that allows streamers to directly impact the environment within the IRL activation. Players compete to win Alienware gaming headsets, keyboards and other swag in both the IRL and digital realms.
For Alienware, the hybrid activation format — and dual target audience — is a first for the brand. While typical metrics for experiential and digital activations will come into play, the company is also focused on new KPIs that consider sentiment and chat participation on Twitch. We spoke with the executive minds behind the activation about their strategic marketing goals, the inspiration behind the partnership and the challenges of bringing it to fruition.
Chief Marketer: How did this activation and partnership come about? And what are your goals with this?
Shannon Baxley, Head of Global Marketing at Alienware: Our purpose behind this was threefold. We knew and recognized that the gamer audience expects something different and expects something more. When we started to ideate through it, there were three things we wanted to accomplish. One of them was to celebrate the legacy of Alienware. It has been in the industry for almost 30 years; we’ll celebrate our 30th next year. As a pioneer there, we wanted to make sure that we were not just leaning into that, but staying true to who we are as a brand — giving gamers the opportunity to escape into new worlds and bringing it to them.
The second objective was to make sure that we were igniting that connection, either with people that are familiar with Alienware and gaming and ones that are not. And also bringing gaming to life for people during a time of the year where there’s a lot of shopping and buying going on, so getting them connected with the gaming industry and with the Alienware brand.
And then the third one was making sure that we were including all in that activation — not just those that were physically there and are able to attend at Grand Central, but also — and that’s where Twitch comes in — making sure that others who may not be able to make it into New York City also had the opportunity to be included.
Victor Lu, Global Head of Brand Partnerships, Amazon’s Twitch Studios: With the live activation mixed with the digital … there’s a broad reach with this type of activation, having people immerse themselves in a gaming focal point and landscape but also employing Twitch. We’re excited to bring some really big streamers into the mix to help bring that activation to life digitally and marry the two, and provide the gaming audience with something that they haven’t seen before, that bridges these worlds, both physical and digital.
CM: Is casting such a wide net across audiences new for Alienware? How have your KPIs evolved?
SB: It’s something that we have not done since COVID, and something that we have acknowledged that gamers are looking for and expecting. And not just gamers, but also consumers as they are making purchase decisions. That journey is much more complex than it has been in the past. And so the traditional vehicles that we may have used and relied on are not necessarily going to be the vehicles that carry us forward into the future. We know that activations like this are important to where we are going and what consumers today are expecting and what will ultimately influence those decisions.
Everything that we do is measurable and we’ll still track all of those upper funnel KPIs. We’ll still be looking at what those engagement KPIs are from a paid/earned/owned perspective. But we’re also looking at new KPIs that we may not have elevated in the past — like sentiment, like chat participation — so that we can actually see what those gamers [say] and take it back, learn from that, and ultimately evolve our thinking. Traditionally it would’ve been foot traffic and viewership. But we want to take it a step further and look at the modern piece of it, too — not just the traditional marketing KPIs that all of us have been brought up with, but starting to look at the net new, just knowing that consumer behavior is changing.
CM: For Twitch, what’s the main benefit here from a marketing perspective?
VL: In working with Alienware, it’s understanding the consumer feedback in real time. On Twitch, everything is live; everything is interactive. When you have real customers, real consumers, giving you feedback in real time to what they’re seeing, and how the brand makes them feel in terms of looking at this new experience where there’s a physical piece, there’s a digital piece, there’s puzzles to solve and challenges and things to activate you as a viewer, that’s valuable feedback that sometimes is lost in an ether of layers of marketing speak or studies and very exacting type of methodologies. But with Twitch, it’s super authentic. It’s out there. We’ll see in real time how people react to it, and build a point of view on sentiment, on chat engagement, on top of the viewership metrics that we’ll deliver. We’ll get direct feedback from core consumers that we’re looking to reach.
SB: That feedback’s not necessarily going to come back exclusively as a marketing KPI. There may be other insights that come through that chatter also that is going to influence what we do as a brand. And just acknowledging that that customer voice is the most important gift that we have and that we will learn and evolve from it is something that we will look at and take very seriously. It’s not just the marketing KPIs that will be looked at, but also the insights that we get for other areas that could influence what we do as a brand, too.
CM: Given that your reach is so broad with an activation in Grand Central, what were some of the challenges you faced to making this happen?
SB: There were quite a few conversations when we initiated the dialogue about it and gaining that internal alignment. This is something that is fairly new in terms of a tactic and it’s very far up there in the funnel, and sometimes that can be tough to find the investment dollars — and, more importantly, for us to prioritize those. Given that this isn’t something that’s just done in a quarter, but a conversation that we’ve been having now for almost a year, making sure that those dollars are still there — ring-fenced, prioritized — was something that we needed to make sure that stayed and was ultimately protected.
Every once in a while there would have to be a reset — let’s go back to the very beginning and what we were looking to achieve here, and make sure everybody is still aligned on it and bring them along that journey internally … It’s hard to imagine an idea for the first seven or eight months before we actually saw something that we could look at. It’s making sure that that investment, that idea was prioritized until we can see something … We aired on the side of overcommunication; we made sure that everybody, those decision makers, were part of the journey from the very beginning and brought them along.
VL: We knew, even when it was more of an amorphous state, the audience, the types of mechanics we wanted to deliver on were there. And the trust comes in where we go through iterations, we go through designs, we look at the different ways to engage, of which there are plenty on Twitch. It’s honing in on what ultimately we want to prioritize as part of the objective, and what do we want consumers to feel. We both had an aligned goal with an activation like this. We don’t want them to just watch something. We don’t want them to just walk by something. We want them to feel the brand and feel a very powerful experience and bridging the digital and the physical together.
CM: Will Twitch create more hybrid gaming experiences like this one?
VL: I think yes … There’s a lot of avenues for IRL exploration … But in this case, instead of just going to a place and seeing it as it is, we’re actually like affecting the environment. We’re going to Grand Central, we’re putting something there that doesn’t usually sit there. And it’s wildly different than anything you would normally see.
Part of this experience is having the streams affect something within the space. Maybe by solving puzzles online, it dictates lighting cues within the space that then create a different mood or a different outcome. Allowing a consumer, a community, to actually affect the narrative of what’s going on … puts the power in a consumer’s hand.
SB: There’s going to be learnings from this. This is a new muscle. As customers expect something different, we as marketers are working to evolve our thinking. And this isn’t something that we have traditionally done in the past, but something that we really felt was important based on customer voice of where we needed to go. Are we going to learn from this? Absolutely. And are we going to evolve? For sure … And this is not just for Alienware, but for this is a test for Dell technologies, too. We’re using it as not just an opportunity to win those hearts and minds, physically and digitally [this] week, but also as marketers to learn from the experience and evolve as customer expectations are evolving.