Brief:

• Lamps Plus sponsored three livestreams from Katie Ruvalcaba, one of the most popular streamers of cooking shows on Twitch, to demonstrate its lighting products in her kitchen. During the four-hour streams, Ruvalcaba showcased LED under-cabinet lights from the 360 Lighting brand, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
• Ruvalcaba, whose Twitch handle is MrsRuvi, talked about the lighting as she prepared food, and demonstrated how the LEDs changed colors as she danced to music. She offered viewers a way to reach a custom section of Lamps Plus's website through a chat keyword.
• Ruvalcaba also appeared as a guest in a food competition that FoodBeast streamed on its Twitch channel, and highlighted signage for LampsPlus.com that reached a broader audience. The streams appeared on Twitch from July 27-31, per Lamps Plus's announcement.

Insight:

Lamp Plus's sponsorship of several livestreams by Katie Ruvalcaba, who is a top 15 streamer in the food and drink category on Twitch, was a departure from its traditional marketing as the retailer sought to reach an audience that's more likely to consume digital media. Seventy-three percent of Twitch's audience consists of people ages 16 to 34, per Business of Apps data cited by Lamps Plus, which overlaps with the retailer's typical shopper demographic.

While Twitch's core audience consists of people who watch others play video games, making the platform popular with teenage boys, Lamps Plus wanted to reach a different demographic by sponsoring Ruvalcaba's stream. Unlike many gamers, Ruvalcaba is a mom in her mid-30s who matches Lamp Plus's target audience. Among her 11,300 followers, 40% are female and tend to be in the 25- to 42-year-old age group, per data she provided to Lamps Plus.

"We wanted to test a Twitch streamer partnership even though it's an uncommon platform for a home furnishings brand," Angela Hsu, senior vice president of marketing and e-commerce for Lamps Plus, said in the announcement. Having seen how many cooking shows on Twitch have poor lighting, Lamps Plus saw an opportunity to demonstrate how products sold in its stores can improve households. The company decided to work with Ruvalcaba because her kitchen is more modern and less cluttered, and could demonstrate its under-cabinet lighting, Hsu said.

Cooking shows like Ruvalcaba's also indicate how Amazon-owned Twitch is expanding programming into non-game categories. Twitch in 2018 added the food and drink category to its platform's "In Real Life" (IRL) categories. Since last year, food and drink livestreams have seen 40% growth in viewership and hours watched, per SullyGnome data cited by Lamps Plus. Grubhub has also experimented with Twitch to target an audience interested in food.