Brands are building ad campaigns with streamers Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed

Dick’s Sporting Goods, like many advertisers that air commercials during March Madness, crammed its TV spot for the NCAA tournament with an ensemble of celebrity athletes, including Tom Brady, Sunisa Lee, Kevin Durant and college football star Travis Hunter. None of those athletes landed the starring role in the sporting goods retailer’s ad, however. Instead, Dick’s centered its March Madness commercial, created by production company OBB Media’s branded content studio, on a hugely popular livestreamer: Darren Watkins Jr., better known online as IShowSpeed. This marks a striking shift in how brands are elevating digital creators during major TV moments. “In our [ad] testing, people recognized Speed in the spot just as much as they recognized Kevin Durant,” said Ryan Gallaher, VP of category marketing at Dick’s. After all, among the Gen Z consumers Dick’s is targeting with its “Speed Shopping” campaign, Watkins “has already been a star,” he added. “It’s just that now, [livestreamers] are having their moment in traditional advertising.” Dick’s is just one of a slew of major brands that have recently tapped into the cultural influence and massive Gen Z audiences of Watkins and fellow streamer Kai Cenat, two of the biggest livestream creators globally. In the past six months, both T-Mobile and State Farm have paired Cenat with traditional celebrities in campaigns spanning broadcast, streaming and social media. McDonald’s teamed up with Cenat in October for a marketing blitz promoting the U.S. debut of the Chicken Big Mac. And earlier this week, Cenat made a cameo appearance in the latest ad from online banking app Chime. He will also kick off a Twitch series with the brand later this month, building upon a sponsored livestream he collaborated with Chime on last year. Also read: How Chime is embracing TikTok finance trends, aka FinTok Cenat and Watkins have reached celebrity status among Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers—and even some of the athletes who appeared alongside Watkins in the Dick’s ad, said Mark Rooks, the brand’s VP of creative, sponsorships and entertainment. “It’s not a very difficult thing to attract top talent from traditional spaces, like athletes and celebrities, to a production like the one we did when you mention that someone like Speed is going to be in the ad,” Rooks said. “Guys like Speed and Kai Cenat create and influence so many trends in the marketplace with the things they’re doing, and their cultural impact is so significant. So, being able to be adjacent to and partner with stars of that caliber is really important to our brand.” Watkins has amassed over 37.7 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel, where he’s accumulated more than 3.8 billion views across his library of past livestreams. Those streams range from Watkins playing video games such as Fortnite to him attending the FIFA World Cup or documenting his travels to countries such as Indonesia and China. He’s also competed in several charity soccer matches with other YouTubers and competed against Cenat in a flag football game organized by YouTube and the NFL ahead of Super Bowl LIX earlier this year. Cenat similarly blends gaming and sports content on his Twitch channel, along with live recordings of his real-life hangouts with friends, creators and celebrities. Past celebrity guests on his Twitch streams have included John Cena, Serena Williams, Snoop Dogg and a plethora of other household names. Cenat has garnered nearly 17 million followers on Twitch alone, along with more than 45,000 active subscribers, according to Streams Charts, a streaming analytics company. Roughly 75% of those subscribers have a Tier 1 subscription to his Twitch channel, meaning they pay a monthly fee of $5.99 to access ad-free versions of Cenat’s streams and receive other perks. He drew an average of 97,500 concurrent viewers across his streams in 2024, and hit a peak of just under 722,000 simultaneous viewers during one livestream last June, according to analytics platform Twitch Tracker. “Kai and Speed are having such a moment,” said Gaylen Malone, senior VP of talent at Loaded, a talent management firm representing gaming creators and streamers. “They’re so culturally relevant right now [that] you can talk to kids in the neighborhood or at school, and almost all of them know who they are.” Watkins and Cenat are even shaping the vocabulary of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Cenat, in particular, helped popularize the words “gyatt,” a slang term for a big butt, and “rizz,” a shortened form of the word “charisma” that refers to someone’s charm and proficiency in wooing romantic partners, among the age cohorts. He and fellow streamer Fanum also invented an entirely new phrase, “Fanum tax,” a slang term for playfully stealing something (typically food) from a friend—something Fanum often does on Cenat’s streams. See also: Gen Z marketing glossary—key words and terms brands need to know Joining the chat State Farm initially cast Cenat in its “Batman vs. Bateman” ad—originally intended to be its Super Bowl spot—just to play the role of a streamer running out onto the streets of Gotham City to record scenes of heroes and villains duking it out, said Alyson Griffin, State Farm’s head of marketing. A 15-second teaser from the campaign is modeled after one of Cenat’s own streams, with him speaking directly to the camera and addressing his “chat” as viewers send in a flurry of live messages such as “NO WAY” and “where’s Batman?” However, “once we met [Cenat] and started working with him, we knew that there was more we could do within the constructs of this one campaign, and we started strategizing with him about what else we could do,” Griffin said. State Farm ultimately landed on expanding its collaboration with Cenat to include an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where Cenat offered a preview of the full State Farm ad along with a sponsored livestream featuring Jake from State Farm, she said. “We are not in a category where one typically makes a lot of risky choices,” Griffin said. “And I’m not saying Kai was a risky choice, because he wasn’t … But having a logo in the lower third of the screen is one thing. Having your biggest, most recognizable asset [Jake from State Farm] on a livestream, where anything can happen, is another.” State Farm gave Cenat a rough outline for the hour-long stream, including periodically handing out prizes (such as an all-expenses-paid trip to Warner Bros. Studio) and State Farm gifting 100 free subscriptions to his Twitch channel to viewers every time Cenat sang the company’s “like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” jingle. State Farm ultimately gave out 1,900 Twitch subscriptions, according to a State Farm spokesperson—which, at a minimum of $5.99 each, cost the company over $11,000. Cenat and Jake also watched the full “Batman vs. Bateman” ad during the stream. But “other than that, it was just the two of them ad-libbing,” Griffin said. And thanks to the giveaway, which required viewers to provide their emails to have a chance at winning one of the prizes, over 20,000 of Cenat’s viewers opted in to receive follow-up messaging from State Farm during the one-hour stream, she said. “We have to understand where [Gen Z consumers] are, and meeting that audience where they are—especially in the insurance category—matters,” Griffin added. We don’t believe anyone’s going to just come to us. Nobody’s gonna seek us out, like ‘Oh, what is State Farm up to today?‘” McDonald’s similarly integrated into one of Cenat’s Twitch streams to kick off the limited-edition U.S. launch of its Chicken Big Mac. During the sponsored livestream in October, Cenat drove to a McDonald’s drive-thru to order the new sandwiches and tasted them for the first time in front of his live audience. The stream quickly devolved into chaos as Grimace and a marching band dressed in McDonald’s red and yellow brand colors burst into Cenat’s home just a few minutes later. John Cena made an appearance later on to try the Chicken Big Mac, too. But McDonald’s went into the partnership with Cenat knowing the brand “had to be comfortable with the discomfort” of not being able to control every creative element of the stream, Amanda Mulligan, the brand’s director of social media and influencer marketing, said at Ad Age’s NextGen Marketing Summit last month. After all, creators such as Cenat “have a massive following and an engaged following for a reason,” she said. “We just have to trust that they know what they’re doing. They’re not going to put their own brand at risk by doing something that’s not going to land with their audience. And I think once you have that trust between both partners, then you can get to great work.” Driving pop culture That’s not to say there isn’t risk involved in partnering with streamers such as Cenat and Watkins. Cenat has been embroiled in several controversies over the past few years, including being charged for inciting a riot in New York City’s Union Square in August 2023 (the charges were later dropped after Cenat paid $55,000 to help cover cleanup and landscaping repair costs). Watkins is an even more controversial figure, having previously been banned from Twitch for two years after making a series of sexist comments and facing a two-week YouTube ban last year after posting several videos of himself jumping over sports cars as they sped toward him—among a slew of other problematic acts. However, advertisers have largely grown more comfortable collaborating with creators such as Cenat and Watkins both within their livestreams and more mainstream mediums such as TV, Loaded’s Malone said. Some brands are still sticking to pre-recorded partnerships with streamers rather than riskier livestream integrations, she said, but many are “getting much more willing to meet creators and their audiences where they’re at” and recognizing the unique value of streamers. She pointed to the growing number of non-endemic brands that have sponsored “The Streamer Awards,” an annual event created and hosted by QTCinderella (a YouTuber and streamer on Loaded’s talent roster) since its launch in 2022. Mountain Dew, for example, brought its brand character “the Mountain Dude” to the show last year to walk the red carpet and present an award, and stocked coolers throughout the venue with cans of its soda, Malone said. Cenat’s agent at United Talent Agency, Matt Alsberg, said advertisers have become more willing to turn creative control over to Cenat as the streamer has grown his audience and established a track record with brands. Creators like Cenat “can be their own little brand agency,” he said, because “they know what’s going to resonate the most [with their audience] and what’s going to drive the most cultural conversation more than anyone.” Contributing: Brandon Doerrer

Streamers are the new celebrity endorsers—why brands are building ad campaigns around Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed

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