Mastercard, a global brand synonymous with delivering priceless experiences, set out to engage travelers during the summer holiday period. Their objectives were clear: drive top-of-mind awareness ahead of holiday planning, boost consideration for Mastercard’s travel experiences, and deepen the brand’s lifestyle appeal.

Mastercard launched a two-phase campaign across key locales in the Middle East, that turned Amazon into a destination for travel inspiration. In Phase One, a summer-long custom landing page on Amazon.ae showcased culinary and travel offers, supported by a full-funnel campaign that included Amazon DSP and a Homepage Hero Takeover that drove high visibility whenever shoppers landed on Amazon.ae. Phase Two kicked off with an interactive, gamified product selector on Mastercard’s custom landing page, recommending Parisian culinary experiences. Though Mastercard doesn’t sell physical products on Amazon, the team innovated by adapting Amazon’s native product selector to link potential travelers directly to Mastercard’s website.

This seamless journey, from discovery on Amazon to purchase on Mastercard’s website, allowed new and returning users to explore and book experiences. Click here to discover the full campaign results.

When OSN+, a streaming service in the MENA region, set out to launch the second season of HBO’s House of the Dragon (HOTD), it wanted something that went above and beyond a typical media plan. Before the series premiered, OSN+ and Amazon Ads orchestrated a series of teasers designed to stoke anticipation. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, over 350,000 specially designed Amazon delivery boxes were produced, with the aim of transforming routine deliveries into delightful doorstep moments. Each box bore striking imagery from HOTD and included a QR code that drove customers to the OSN+ Brand Store on Amazon.sa.

Wondering what the custom Amazon boxes looked like? Click here to find out.

Moreover, OSN+ transformed Amazon.sa into an immersive House of the Dragon battlefield, where visitors chose between Team Black and Team Green through an interactive Brand Store experience allowing fans to explore exclusive trailers and character histories through a tailored experience that revealed the secrets and rivalries of their chosen house. This dual-path content journey helped visitors delve deeper into each house’s story, further increasing engagement on the page while creating a natural journey to the OSN+ website, where viewers could subscribe to watch the new season of HOTD.

During the launch day, the campaign utilized the homepage takeover, draping the website in black or green, piquing curiosity among Amazon shoppers who might not have been die-hard fans of the show, and tapped into Twitch, with a hero headline on the service’s homepage and a First Impression Takeover, where viewers would see an OSN+ pop-up during their first Twitch broadcast of the day. Click here to learn more about the impact and results the campaign drove.

The new solutions provide streamlined, authentic ways for brands to engage with streamers and their communities and can be activated in as little as two weeks. Each solution is templated to help brands easily scale campaigns across multiple streamers, at speed, with minimal input required from the advertiser. The new offering includes:

• Channel skins: Clickable, branded graphics that frame the video player during sponsored streams on both web and mobile. These streamer-endorsed overlays appear throughout the stream with integrated clickable call-to-actions such as ‘click here to find out more’ helping to drive engagement in real time. While active, skins are promoted to all of the streamer’s followers via the Twitch navigation panel, further enhancing campaign reach.
• Streamer readouts: Streamers deliver brand messages in their own voice, live on stream—bringing branded storytelling to life in a way that feels personal and unscripted. Advertisers provide the streamer with key talking points, which they then tailor to align with their audience and tone, helping to deliver a deeper level of engagement between the brand and the streamer’s community. Streamer readouts are also an opportunity for brands to get real-time feedback from the Twitch community on a new product or service via ‘Chat’. Chat is an interactive function that appears next to the livestream and enables viewers to type messages to the streamer and other viewers, as well as share emotes, Twitch’s version of emojis.
• Sponsored subscriptions: Brands can offer 50% off subscriptions on a streamer’s channel for a limited time (typically one day). This boosts goodwill with the streamer’s community while giving viewers access to unique emotes and exclusive content, strengthening emotional connections to the brand.
• Follower promotions: Brand-partnered streams are automatically boosted to the top of viewers’ following list—maximising visibility at the moment it matters most. These promoted tiles display both the brand’s logo and the streamer’s image, with hover functionality revealing campaign rewards or incentives like discount codes.

Helping brands find the right streamers  

Amazon Ads has launched the Twitch Creator Matchmaking tool, a simple, free-to-use solution that matches brands with streamers based on their category, audience, location, budget, and previous campaign results. The tool supports brands looking to collaborate on specific campaigns as well as those looking for longer term brand ambassadors and is completely self-service.

With 58% of Twitch users agreeing advertising is important as it supports their favourite streamer, partnerships between brands and streamers can drive meaningful business results for advertisers. For example, 42% of Twitch users have purchased a tech product or service after seeing it promoted by a streamer. Across other categories, 32% have purchased food and drink, 23% have purchased clothing / accessories, and 19% have purchased or streamed music, after seeing it promoted by a streamer on Twitch.

“Twitch Creator Sponsorships give brands in our region a simple, scalable way to engage with streamers and their communities across gaming, sports, music, lifestyle, and more.” said Filip Jabbour, General Manager, Amazon Ads, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey. “With the addition of the Twitch Creator Matchmaking Tool, advertisers can now easily find streamers that align with their brand and objectives. Here in MENA, the world’s second fastest growing gaming market, these solutions offer a powerful way for brands to tap into the region’s highly engaged gaming community, experiment with Twitch advertising, build awareness, and gather real-time feedback from Twitch’s millions of monthly visitors.”

Connecting the dots with the Amazon DSP

Twitch Creator Sponsorships, along with all Twitch ad formats, are sold programmatically via the Amazon DSP, along with Prime Video, display, online video and audio ads. The Amazon DSP is a comprehensive full-funnel solution that enables advertisers to manage their entire campaign strategy—from awareness to conversion— through a single, tool that is powered by AI and Amazon’s trillions of first party buying, browsing and streaming signals.

“Advertisers can now access impactful, streamer-led storytelling at scale, with the simplicity of a streamlined buying experience and the measurement capabilities they expect from Amazon Ads and our DSP,” said Jabbour. “Powered by advanced AI optimization, the Amazon DSP enables brands to make data-driven decisions in real-time, increasing efficiency, and improving campaign performance, regardless of whether the customer journey finishes on Amazon or not.”

Advertisers utilising Twitch Creator Sponsorships can access the full range of Amazon Ads measurement solutions to understand the full-funnel impact of their campaigns, including key metrics like sales in their Amazon store, sign-ups, or sales on their own website. This is in addition to standard performance indicators such as impressions, click-through rates, and total views.

Twitch Creator Sponsorships are available now across Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Turkey.