What Will the Ad World Be Talking About Coming Out of TwitchCon San Diego?

The global head of Twitch Brand Partnership Studio discusses the power of live entertainment and what brands can expect from the annual gaming convention

TwitchCon: It’s like gaming culture meets music festival energy.

The convention from livestreaming service Twitch happens twice a year—once in Europe and once in North America. Over three days, Twitch brings together livestreamers, gamers, esports pros and fans under one roof for a weekend of gaming, community, workshops and more.

Ahead of the big weekend, Muse chatted with the global head of Twitch Brand Partnership Studio Victor Lu to discuss the current state of activations in gaming and what marketers can expect coming out of TwitchCon San Diego.

Part of the Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab, Lu oversees an award-winning team spanning creative, content and interactive tech disciplines, building innovative programs that authentically bring brand partners into the creator economy.

The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Muse: Ahead of TwitchCon San Diego, what’s the single biggest misconception today’s marketers still hold about Twitch?

Lu: That it’s a gaming channel you buy, rather than a set of communities you join. Gaming is still a huge cultural component on Twitch. But categories like Just Chatting (frequently the No. 1 category on Twitch, by the way), music, sports and beauty are among our fastest-growing verticals, with real-life (IRL) content up 186 percent in hours watched year-over-year. The deeper misread, though, is treating Twitch like inventory for standard ads. It’s live and unedited and the brands that show up authentically in the community are the ones that see it work.

Gen Z is actively pushing back against formulaic “reach” plays. How is this “authenticity reckoning” changing what the Twitch Brand Partnership Studio advises brands to build?

Gen Z is telling us plainly what they think. Our “Authenticity Reset” research found that 78 percent of Gen Z say social media feels fake and 77 percent want original content over formulaic campaigns. You can’t outspend that sentiment—you can only be genuinely different. So our advice has shifted from “How many people can we reach?” to “What can we make that this community actually wants to be part of and finds value in?” That means building around what already works for the creator, not a rigid script. In the same study, 8 in 10 of the livestreams we tested produced a real, unscripted surprise moment you simply can’t manufacture in an edit.

What does real “attention” look like on Twitch compared to live television? How can brands turn live interactivity into their biggest creative advantage?

On most channels, you fight for a fraction of a second. On Twitch, people choose to be there and settle in for over 70 minutes a session, leaning in rather than scrolling past. And it shows in the numbers. Our recent research with attention measurement company Lumen shows 92 percent of Twitch ads are looked at, versus around 62 percent on social. The difference from TV is participation. Television is something you watch, while Twitch is something you do. The creative advantage comes from giving the audience a role, letting them steer the stream and create moments that only exist because the community made them happen.

Marketers still struggle with letting go of brand guardrails. How do you convince cautious brand managers to pass the steering wheel to creators without fearing “brand cringe”?

Cringe comes from the opposite of what managers fear. It happens when a brand forces a creator to say something that isn’t theirs, and audiences spot it instantly. Collaborating on the creative and trusting the creator—and audience—with control is the safer bet, not the riskier one. We de-risk it through fit and curation. We find the right creator whose community already overlaps with the brand, agree on non-negotiables up front and give them room to speak in their own voice. Brands still own what matters most—their message and values—and because every result is measurable, they get proof rather than promises.

Brands are increasingly under pressure to deliver on their media investments. How are you connecting real-time community culture directly to commercial performance and bottom-line outcomes?

This is where being inside Amazon Ads changes the conversation. Twitch isn’t a standalone bolt-on; it uses the same infrastructure and measurement tools brands already run with Amazon, so we can connect a live community moment all the way through to add-to-cart and purchase. The outcomes back it up: brands adding Twitch to their Amazon Ads campaigns in the U.S. saw a 2.26x higher purchase rate and 74 percent incremental reach on top of Prime Video standalone. So the pitch isn’t “Trust that culture works,” it’s “Here’s the result it drove, measured the way you measure everything else.”

What will the ad world be talking about coming out of TwitchCon San Diego?

The mainstreamer. Walk the TwitchCon floor and you can see it happening. The streamers pulling the biggest crowds aren’t niche gaming names anymore; they’re the A-list for a whole generation, shaping culture far beyond their own channels. These are creators who’ve built their personal brands on being themselves, and being deeply connected to their community comes with the territory. That’s the story brands will take home: showing up credibly now means starting with a creator and being brave enough to hand them the wheel, rather than dropping a finished ad beside their content. I think “authenticity” will finally move from buzzword to practice—proving you can do creator-led, community-first work at scale and see it pay off. Time and again, we see brands leave TwitchCon no longer asking, “Should we be on Twitch?” but “Why aren’t we already building here?”

Related: Controlled by Chat: Inside Twitch’s Interactive Arcade, The Claw