Twitch: The streamers furious at Burger King
By Will Chalk
Newsbeat reporter
- Published

It's the feud we were not expecting: Twitch Streamers vs Burger King.
And, much like a flame-grilled burger, it's hotting up.
It's all to do with an ad campaign the fast food chain has put out that streamers have accused of being "scummy" and exploitative.
They're being very vocal about it online.
Burger King, on the other hand, is staying silent - and hasn't responded to our requests for a statement.
Title: The King of Stream
— Ogilvy (@Ogilvy) August 18, 2020
Client: Burger King
Team: @weareDAVIDmad
Burger King turned Twitch's donation feature into a marketing campaign.
Check out more #ClientWork, here: https://t.co/F7JV9RUakK pic.twitter.com/KUhtxctwhu
The whole thing revolves around a bot on Twitch that reads out messages from fans during a stream.
It's designed so viewers, in exchange for a small donation, can ask their favourite streamers questions or comment on how they're playing.
Burger King, though, has been using it to advertise its latest offers.
It means it's been getting exposure that would have cost thousands of pounds for as little as £2.50.
'This is not OK'
"When it first happened I thought it was a joke," Ross O'Donovan tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.
He has hundreds of thousands of followers on his Twitch channel RubberNinja.
Ross was live earlier this year when a user called King of Stream donated $5 (£3.80), but - instead of a typical fan message - the bot started reading out Burger King deals.
"We generally follow protocol when it comes to doing advertisements. You have to disclose that it's an ad to your viewers," Ross says.
"It costs a lot more than $5 for a company to partner with a streamer, so it's just very scummy to circumvent that whole thing and do it through a donation."
WAIT.. THIS HAPPENED TO ME. What the hell. I guess they didn't want to use my clips because I said "Oh I worked for you guys in Australia at Hungry Jacks.. Putting frozen pink waffles in a broiler for hours on end. Hated it.".. LMAO https://t.co/fowASxUcyf
— Ross O'Donovan (@RubberNinja) August 20, 2020
Burger King has since released a promotional video, via advertising company Ogilvy, that shows the same thing happening to other streamers whose faces have been blurred and voices altered.
In the video, the company says it turned "donations into ads" by making "streamers and viewers hungry".
But Ross says the campaign is a slap in the face to streamers, who rely on actual sponsorship deals to make their living.
"We work really hard to try to keep our audiences entertained and to have our streams hijacked like that is just unethical.
"It's not fair and I hope they use this as a study to show marketing students in the future what is OK and what is not OK, because this definitely wasn't."
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Take a quick scroll through Twitter and you can find plenty of other big name streamers who are unhappy.
I really despise when companies take advantage of my live content in order to push their ads without clearing it with me first or offering what I should be paid for the marketing, which is more than $5 I'm pretty sure.
— Anne Munition (@AnneMunition) August 19, 2020
I encourage other companies not to be like this one.
This is exceptionally low class.
— Cohh Carnage (@CohhCarnage) August 19, 2020
Taking advantage of a system meant to support these streamers, utilizing it for big-name companies that could easily afford to do it properly and then bragging about it?
Predatory marketing. Cool.
This is really bad though? Instead of reaching out to a streamer to work with the brand, an ad is just SLAPPED on the stream without seeing if they even want to work with the brand. Isn’t it a pretty standard rule for no self advertising? 🤣 what the heck man.
— Ms5000Watts (@Ms5000Watts) August 20, 2020
"A lot of streamers are really upset about this because normally companies go through an ad agency, you talk to them and you make a deal," Ross adds.
"Then, importantly, you tell your viewers you're doing an advertisement.
"So for Burger King to essentially do guerrilla warfare puts us in a weird spot because we're not disclosing to our viewers that it's an advertisement - because we didn't know."
We contacted Burger King, Ogilvy and Twitch for a comment, but none of them got back to us before publication.
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