Twitch streamer’s message to brands: ‘Trust us’
TwitchCon Europe 2025
Sheffield-based Soupforeloise sat down with The Media Leader to discuss how to work with brands and the challenges of growing a full-time live-streaming business.
How can brands get the most out of their campaigns with Twitch streamers? Given the unpredictability of the live environment and the fact that a sponsored stream can last several hours, the format can present unique challenges and uncertainties.
“There’s probably some nervousness from brands to work with live streamers,” admits Soupforeloise (or Eloise). Speaking to The Media Leader amid the bustle of TwitchCon Europe in Rotterdam, she advises brands and creators to communicate closely to ensure a quality end product.
“You can’t just ask for a reshoot — it’s a live moment,” she continues. “That’s where that communication beforehand really comes in. And also just choosing streamers that you’ve seen their content, you’ve had a little browse, you trust can deliver what you’re looking for in that way.
“It doesn’t have to be scary at all. We want to do a good job as well.”
The Sheffield-based streamer counts more than 56,400 followers on Twitch, as well as 21,600 on TikTok, 41,600 on Instagram and 74,200 on YouTube. She keeps a consistent streaming schedule, going live four to five times per week, with each session lasting around three hours.
A full-time creator after a handful of years doing it part-time, streaming Minecraft is Eloise’s “bread and butter”, but she also plays other games that are popular in the “spur of the moment” and enjoys Just Chatting and conducting baking streams. She has high praise for her moderators, who help ensure she has a safe online forum to interact with followers.
“You get to have one of the best jobs in the world, really, and what comes with that is a different level of privacy than what most people are used to,” she explains. “I’m quite open-book, but that doesn’t mean you can pry into whatever you want.”
‘Misaligned expectations’ between brands and influencers hamper creator economy
Transferring trust
Like most full-time streamers, working with brands is a “positive opportunity” for Eloise, although she recognises the nature of the relationship can be “challenging” to manage given the potential for misaligned goals.
Past clients have included Nintendo, WhatsApp, Pot Noodle and Squarespace, and she would consider working with brands even if she lacks a personal affinity for them, as long as they don’t compromise her ethics (Eloise has, for example, turned down an opportunity to work with a vaping brand).
That isn’t necessarily true of every streamer. Lydia Violet, a Twitch creator with over half a million followers, told a crowd of marketers gathered ahead of TwitchCon that she prefers to work with brands she likes personally.
“[The audience] trust I only work with brands I love and so they trust the brand,” she explained. Violet further argued that Twitch’s long watch times are great for developing community and creating long-form opportunities for advertisers.
The popularity of Twitch streamers can be great for spurring earned media value online, Violet contended. Clips of sponsored streams can be posted on other platforms, with loyal subscribers helping to make especially outlandish efforts go viral.
For Eloise, growing multiplatform follower counts is thus part of her long-term growth strategy.
Guidelines welcome
According to Eloise, clear timelines and deliverables are key to a successful brand campaign when working with Twitch creators.
“It’s so helpful to me when a brand comes in with a clear vision of what they want,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be that they’ve got an entire stream planned out, but if they go ‘These are the key messages that we want, we would like this specific callout at least x number of times’. And then they go ‘the way in which you deliver that is your free rein — you know your audience best, you know how to deliver that in a way that’s receptive to them’.”
Eloise adds that while she would never expect a brand to allow any creator to do whatever they want, “it’s great when they can trust us to know what makes our audience tick”.
For Twitch, active audience engagement is a core unique selling proposition for brands. The platform, along with YouTube, has cornered the live-streaming market; 60% of global gaming live streams occur on Twitch.
For Eloise, branded YouTube content is typically too “perfectly delivered”, with reshoots and edits. “What you lose in that is the authenticity,” she argues.
Eloise implores brands not to “fear live streaming” as it is “one of the most unique and personalised ways to reach an audience”. Her viewers don’t merely listen to brand messages but “actively engage” in them, she explains.
For example, for her partnership with WhatsApp, Eloise created a mini-game her audience could play live. She tells The Media Leader that, a year on, she still receives demand from followers to bring the mini-game back.
Likewise, an emote created for her Pot Noodles campaign is still in regular use by her subscribers — equating to free media for the snack brand simply because the community enjoys it.
“Lean in to the fact that it’s a live stream,” she advises. “There’s so many different ways you can engage an audience, through emotes, through overlays — all these things that aren’t offered elsewhere.
“Don’t fear it. Trust us.”
The Media Leader was invited to TwitchCon by Amazon