The latest Mountain Dew marketing campaign is their strangest one yet: An AI bot is trawling Twitch streams for visible Mountain Dew products.
Ah, Mountain Dew, the drink of choice for Gamers™. Gaming culture in general has a long and complicated history with the brand (the infamous Geoff Keighley interview in 2012 comes to mind). So in a way it makes sense for PepsiCo to keep targeting the gaming sphere with their marketing campaigns! Still, the new MTN DEW RAID campaign on Twitch might be taking things a bit too far.
For the past 6 days, an AI has apparently been checking every stream in Twitch's Games category for any appearance of Mountain Dew products. If it finds one it prompts the streamer to opt into their campaign, and if they accept the AI will keep monitoring their stream and possibly feature it on the brand's own Twitch channel within the next two days. The campaign's official Q&A also makes it very clear that you need to have a Mountain Dew product be visible in your stream camera at all times to stay in the running:
Once you accept, the RAID AI will keep monitoring your stream for the presence of MTN DEW, if you remove your DEW, you’ll be prompted to bring it back on camera, if you don’t, you’ll be removed from our participating streamers.
The Future Of Marketing Is Now
I don't know about you, but to me this whole campaign is very unsettling. "Drink Verification Can To Continue" was supposed to be a dystopic parody of aggressive marketing campaigns infiltrating gaming communities back in 2013, not a Torment Nexus for marketing researchers to recreate. But apparently the future is now!
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary taleTech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
— Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman) November 8, 2021
It might be worth it for smaller streamers who don't have many other avenues to grow their audience, but considering the whole "an AI will be constantly monitoring your stream" aspect it'd probably feel just a tiny bit like selling your soul to the Dew-flavored devil. Besides, time slots on the Mountain Dew Twitch page will be limited, so even if you do sign this particular deal you may not get anything out of it and just do some free Dew marketing.
Either way, the campaign runs until December 8, so if you're a fledgling Twitch streamer who wants to give the campaign a shot you'd best get your verification cans ready before then.