Knorr has turned to Twitch for the launch of its new global campaign, which seeks to make vegetables more valuable and important in online gaming, while promoting its brand.

Targeting 18- to 34-year-olds, the “#modtheveg” campaign encourages developers to produce in-game modifications, known as mods, and generate more points for vegetables, since meat-based foods are usually the ones that give the most points to the characters. As part of the initiative, Knorr partnered with different video game brands, such as Fortnite and Minecraft, to create more powerful vegetable mods in the games and test them with the gaming community.

For the Canadian launch, the Unilever brand also partnered with gamers Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins and Jordy2D to host a joint stream on Twitch, in which they played with new veggie mods in the Only Up Parkour game. Following the stream, which was held yesterday afternoon, Knorr will post highlights of the game on streamers’ social channels, such as TikTok and YouTube.

“The core idea was initially sparked through the gaming community, by gamers themselves – finding that in video games, eating vegetables is less rewarding than eating other kinds of food. And to us, this mismatch makes no sense,” Knorr associate brand manager Heidi Poon tells MiC. According to her, Knorr taste combos (the company’s easy-to-prepare recipes) include vegetables, as does the marketing for many of the brand’s products, so boosting the value of vegetables online can lead to an increase in their popularity in real life.

Poon says Twitch was the ideal channel to launch the campaign in Canada, as video games are booming in the country and most people are turning to that social platform to play: about 23 million Canadians regularly play video games, with 18-34 year olds spending most of their time doing so. Some 10.5 million people in Canada also use Twitch.

“For our first foray into the gaming world, we needed to be where the audience was, with authentic and credible voices they already know and respect,” says Poon. “Twitch was also a natural playground for us to not only reach this audience, but show off the mods in a collaborative way and engage fans through the process with in-platform mechanics like polls and predictions.”

PHD is handling media buying in Canada, with Oliver Agency handling organic social media and Edelman handling creative. Globally, ITB and The Invaders led the creative development.

Knorr has launched “#modtheveg” in different countries from Germany to the Philippines, the UK and Mexico.