How Starbucks is using Twitch to find new consumers

Starbucks recently enlisted freestyle rapper Harry Mack to recommend various flavors of the company’s at-home coffee products to consumers via improvised rap verses. It’s somewhat of an unconventional influencer deal for the coffee chain—but more than that, it signifies Starbucks’ interest in tapping a new consumer base on a social media platform the company had previously never explored: Twitch. 

“We’ve been eyeing the opportune moment to dip our toe into the ‘stream,’ so to speak,” Trudy Nyairo, senior manager of Starbucks brand marketing at Nestlé—which oversees the marketing and distribution of Starbucks’ consumer products—wrote in an email to Ad Age. “Even though [Twitch’s] roots are in video gaming and esports, the platform has expanded rapidly, and we’re certainly exploring how to leverage it, especially in reaching the younger, digitally savvy audiences.”

As part of the company’s partnership with Mack, Starbucks sponsored an hour-long livestream on his Twitch channel revolving around Mack sharing freestyle “reverse roasts” with his viewers. But unlike the traditional “roast”—a comedic but disparaging takedown that highlights a person’s negative traits or flaws—Mack instead crafted freestyle rap verses that suggested various Starbucks coffee flavors to his viewers based on personality descriptors they typed in the chat section of his stream.

“So, you’re adventurous—the caramel would fit that—but you’re also dependable, and I get that,” Mack rapped in response to one viewer describing themselves with the adjectives “adventurous,” “dependable” and “passionate.” “In that case, I’ma drop a riddle about Pike Place, 'cuz you know it’s landing down the middle.” 

Sponsoring one of Mack’s streams served as “a great entry point” for Starbucks to extend the company’s creator partnerships into the realm of Twitch due to his established following of 105,000, Nyairo said. And Mack regularly streams himself thinking up freestyle rap based on prompts from his viewers, making it relatively seamless for Starbucks to integrate itself into his content. 

Nyairo pointed to the “explosive” growth of Twitch as the catalyst for the company’s interest in venturing onto the platform. The platform currently draws in an average of more than 31 million daily visitors, with roughly 2.5 million users concurrently viewing some piece of livestreamed content on the site “at any given moment,” per Twitch data. And the vast majority of those users—over 70%—fall into the coveted Gen Z and young Millennial demographic that many brands perpetually aim to reach.

Though gaming content still comprises the largest chunk of Twitch livestreams, dozens of other content niches have also steadily grown in popularity on the platform. Twitch’s music category, for example, currently has over 9 million followers and features hundreds of videos of users playing instruments, singing or DJing for their virtual viewers. 

The unscripted, informal nature of livestreamed content on a platform such as Twitch also aligns well with Mack’s off-the-cuff freestyle rap, he said.

Mack’s biggest priority when working with a brand is to maintain the spontaneity of his rapping and invent his brand-inspired verses without the brand requiring him to write them out ahead of time, which Starbucks allowed for, he said.

“Their team did not want to fake anything. They wanted to make sure it was really authentic,” Mack said. “We collaborated on the idea [of the ‘reverse roast’], but they came right out of the gate saying, ‘We want to do something real and true to your brand.’”

Mack’s stream, which peaked at 537 concurrent viewers while it was live and has since racked up over 3,200 total views as of writing, represents only one element of his partnership with Starbucks. He announced his collaboration with the company in a video posted to both his TikTok and Instagram that features Mack approaching strangers in the coffee aisle of a grocery store to recommend Starbucks products through freestyle rap. These interactions were “real moments,” Mack said, as he had never met any of the people who he rapped for in the video, and they were “genuinely surprised” by his impromptu freestyling.

Starbucks’ partnership with Mack is part of the company’s overarching “Made To Be Yours” campaign, which centers its at-home coffee products, from ground and whole bean coffee to Keurig coffee pods and pre-made bottled beverages. And, as such, Starbucks wanted to maintain the focus on at-home experiences by extending Mack’s “reverse roasts” from the grocery store to consumers’ homes, Nyairo said.

“This is what drove the idea of the Twitch livestream to offer consumers the opportunity to participate firsthand by joining online and dropping a few words about themselves in the chat to receive a personalized—and freestyled—coffee recommendation from Harry himself,” she added.