Following the success of a campaign that saw national hot wing chain Wingstop enlisting Twitch streamers to promote its products, the company has decided to explore pursuing gaming as an arm of its marketing strategy.

Its initial gaming-related campaign was part of a larger effort to promote the company’s 25th anniversary earlier this year. At the forefront of its quarter-century celebration was the introduction of a number of limited-time wing flavors available over the course of 25 days. One media figure enlisted to promote these special flavors was Chaos, a YouTuber who regularly posts gaming content to his relatively popular channel.

Chaos—chosen in part for his self-professed love for Wingstop wings—was paired with Black-ish star Anthony Anderson as part of a miniseries titled “Carpooling with Cool People Eating Wings” in one of the weirder riffs on James Corden’s incomprehensibly popular celebrity karaoke series.

Later on, also as part of this anniversary campaign, Wingstop tasked Twitch streamers with eating wings on-camera during their gameplay sessions. This obviously included playing games like Dark Souls, Teamfight Tactics and others (one of those games sounds much harder than the other to play while eating). The streamers chosen to do this were JoshOG, TheHaleyBaby, ProfessorBroman and LobosJr, who Wingstop explained were chosen not due to their having the highest follower counts, but for representing a variety of personalities and streaming styles, intended to reach the widest possible gaming audience.

This led to huge amounts of engagement with Wingstop’s online presence from the gaming community. LoboJr’s stream single-handedly brought the company 167,770 unique views and featured a peak of 17,837 concurrent viewers. Additionally, the participating streams featured a custom Twitch extension that asked viewers to vote for which wing flavor the streamer would consume next.

Wingstop must have been happy with the significant amount of engagement from each of these content creators’ fan bases because the company has decided to pursue subsequent campaigns intended to reach a video game-loving audience. The Wingstop team is even considering making gaming a “core pillar” of its marketing strategy down the line. Current pillars aren’t limited to but definitely include Rick Ross.

Source: Escapist Magazine