Food Theory: Did Burger King JUST Break The Law?

Hey, I'm allowed to customize my awesome, cool, so I'll get great flavor with no tomato, no onion, and no predatory marketing practices. Hello Internet, welcome to Food Theory, where today we're ta

king

a big bite out of a raging controversy. In the fast

food

and streaming communities, as I'm sure most of you know, Twitch is a live streaming platform that allows streamers to interact directly with their audiences in approximately real time, the audience writes comments in the chat and the live streamer responds to the camera. and there are many ways for those interactions to occur, the three most common being basic chat messages, sending money to the streamer by donating Twitch bits, and paying to subscribe to the channel over a series of months, but there are other interesting tools.

One of them, which may not be as well known, is a chat feature called text-to-speech or tts, where for a small donation you can pay to have a computerized voice read your message aloud in the broadcast so that everyone, including the transmitter, listen to it now. As an internet dweller, you probably know how good it will be to open a free platform for a random comment to be heard, but I'll still tell you that donations are sometimes pretty much what you'd expect them to be. a creep who wants to see a woman in a bra hey, that's it, yeah, stop apologizing for it and sometimes,

just

sometimes, text-to-speech donations are absolutely healthy midi oh, you're an absolute ray of sunshine, I love this broadcast, have coffee with me, thank you.

You have a lot of midi, but regardless of the motivation at the end of the day, tts donations are intended and generally used as a way for fans to give back to their favorite creators a tool to help ensure their comments don't get lost in the chat scroll and that my friends is where the story of today's

food

theory

begins. You see, last summer, Burger King in conjunction with advertising agency David Madrid realized that tts donations could be used to advertise bk's menu, so they created a campaign called The King of Stream in It went to dozens of different Twitch streams and paid the minimum donation, an amount set by each individual streamer, but usually in the range of three to five dollars to have their comments read via text-to-speech, at which point the entire audience and the transmitters. they found out themselves about all the great deals the Burger King menu has to offer Hi, hey, I

just

donated five dollars to tell you that you can spend five dollars and get a big surprise.

What's happening in the end, the streaming

king

's campaign reached a large audience on a shoestring budget and was seen as a success, how do we know that? Because Burger King's ad agency took the footage of all of these interactions and compiled the best of it, proudly explaining what they did, and you know, they did it without licensing anyone's names. they look like voices, hence all the blurring and distortion you see, they never use the word twitch anywhere in the ad, opting instead for the more general term live streaming platform and the blatant use of the purple and twitch target, they even replaced the gameplay footage from the original streams with Shutterstock footage of generic video games since they didn't want to license that stuff, must love all those racing games with speedrunning, speedrunning, and faster, faster , faster and faster at all the traffic signs you pass.

I have donated five. dollars, so I can say it's on the Burger King app. You can get a great message. Are you going to sponsor me or not? That exchange says it all. Are you going to sponsor me or what?, to which Burger King responds that we just gave you five dollars. In the wake of this campaign, two team marketing camps have emerged that believe there is nothing wrong with how Burger King did this like it was a 200 iq play. The brand should have been doing this a long time ago. Congratulations to Burger King. I'm going shopping. a huge after this and a team streamer who believes the campaign was a disgusting way for a billion dollar corporation to sell their chicken nuggets for a fraction of what it should have really cost them because Burger King has discovered how to sponsor The Pocket Change by abusing a system meant for fan interaction without the prior consent of streamers has understandably angered almost all streamers on Twitch and while it is true that many streamers were speaking out against the campaign of the king of broadcasts, where is Mike Madrev?

You owe me royalties that's why you took up 30 seconds of my stream, some went even further to question whether this move by Burger King went beyond a mere label violation and entered into illegal territory by violating the Federal Trade Commission or the FTC guidelines. I woke up this morning. I had emails from bbc kotaku to name a few. My claim is that if this is legit, it's an FTC violation and they shouldn't have done it because it puts us in a position where we're airing undisclosed ads, so who's right? and who is wrong here friends, this whole fiasco is either a complete ham

burger

with nothing or it is totally a ham

burger

.

Did Burger King really pull off a 200 IQ move that will have you laughing all the way to the bank or will team streamer finally get the last one? possibly laughing in a court of law and that, dear theorists, is what we will answer today before we get into the hairy gray area of ​​whether or not this was some form of legal advocacy. One thing that is undeniable here is that the king of the stream. The campaign was a clear violation of the terms of service. One of the marketing team's arguments in this whole debate has been that if streamers weren't happy with the messages Burger King was reading, they could always turn off all text-to-speech donations, except that kind of logic doesn't apply here. .

Burger King was misusing, knowingly or not, the tools available. Twitch's terms of service list unsolicited advertising promotional materials or other solicitation material as prohibited behavior, but perhaps more importantly, Burger King appears to have violated the terms. of service for third-party live streaming software that actually handles donations and provides text-to-speech functionality to boot. Twitch is simply the platform, it doesn't provide its users with those kinds of fancy details to To accept donations, a Twitch streamer has to use live streaming software, such as Stream Labs, which is separate from Twitch and comes with its own terms of agreement. separate services and it appears that the Stream King campaign violated Streamlabs' terms of service in many ways. also quotes from those who use the site for commercial or promotional purposes are listed under prohibited conduct, such as displaying an unauthorized commercial advertisement, attempting to post messages or advertisements for a commercial purpose, in addition, the terms of service specify commercial activities or sales without prior writing. streamlabs consent as prohibited content, I mean, it really doesn't get any clearer than that, both from Twitch's perspective and from streamlabs' perspective, Burger King's posts clearly violated the terms and conditions and now, of course, violate the terms. of service doesn't mean bk broke the law, sure from an ethical and PR point of view, it's not a good look, but on the other hand, so what not to do to be nihilistic, but what are they going to do Twitch or Stream Labs to punish him?

From the looks of it, the Burger King account may have already deleted the King of Stream U.S. account. they got the footage they needed themselves, they spread the word about bk's apps and menu offerings at this point, they already pulled everything they needed from the It's time for the Twitch community to cash out, basically they pulled a ninja so the team streamer can take solace in moral victory if they wish, but the bigger issue and the one with far more ramifications is whether this ad campaign was illegal for anyone touching it and that is. It's not easy to answer because the king of streaming basically introduced the world to a completely new type of advertising, as this type of advertisement is called.

To date, only a couple of companies have tried anything close to the streaming king's campaign on Twitch. in particular, the cash app that managed to do it without taking too much away from Twitch streamers because a cash app actually creates Twitch content and they didn't just use the absolute minimum donation like Burger King did. I would say that, in my opinion, it is very different from What does the cash app usually give away subscribers and streamers? There is no message with gifted subscribers. There is no automatic readout of what the cash app does. By the way, I have never seen a cash app.

Only give away a sub that you're normally giving away. I would do it. Let's say 10 20 25 subscribers minimum, which is a lot more than a measly five dollar donation anyway, since the practice is so new that it would be helpful to have a definition on hand. Do corporate text-to-speech donations qualify as sponsorships? Ads are a completely different thing, what does this thing BK created look like in the eyes of the law? Now the term sponsorship implies a relationship between the two parties in question, so I'll go ahead and say that an unexpected text-to-speech conversion occurred. A donation from a corporate donor does not qualify as sponsorship, contrary to what many streamers might feel.

The important difference between an ad and a sponsorship is that an ad doesn't really imply any type of endorsement from the creator. As a YouTube partner, for example, I have a lot of control over where ads appear in my videos, but I have much less control over which advertisers choose to run those ads, and in my experience, audiences tend to understand this, dear viewers. At home, I understand that just because a shout-at-the-puppies church ad was played on my channel before a video, that doesn't mean I support or even have any kind of opinion on the shout-at-the-puppies church, however , if I were to announce that an episode had been sponsored by the church of yelling at puppies, then I would have to believe I would get a lot of harsh comments from fans and I deserve it because I actively chose that sponsorship over the pre-roll. ad where it was just imposed on me Now seeing the reactions the bk donations got, it's clear that the streamers weren't aware of what was going on.

I just received a donation that used the text of as an adverb. I am so confident and because the streamer and Burger King did not have any agreement or business relationship to speak of the streamers, they have absolutely no obligation to endorse Burger King products. Any streamer who receives a tts donation is free to do what Twitch Streamer Rubber Ninja told Burger King to their face. He was going to use the donation to buy a real meal, then go on social media and call the campaign quote disgusting, and then double the donations he received and donate them to Ronald McDonald House, which is a galactic brain stock that is happening right there.

Fast food in the US is not good, it's not that good, it's disappointing. You know, with all this fast food money, I could go out and buy a real meal. Surprise. The Rubber Ninja footage didn't make it into the Burger King compilation for some reason. It's not entirely clear that the king of streaming donations is the closest thing to a traditional ad, as Bloom Adds cites it: advertising implies that a payment has been made to place an ad with specific messages and Burger King does this explicitly with your tts messages and things from that perspective. It's starting to look very different because now you're not comparing those five dollar donations to thousand dollar sponsorship deals, but instead comparing apples to very expensive oranges, it seems more accurate to compare Burger King's tts donation ads to the mid-roll ads. because, let's face it, they're both ads and they both play in the middle of the stream, I mean, I make sure that streamers can select when their mid-roll ads play instead of being surprised by an ad every time they play. the sponsor decides the time is right, but since Twitch recently started experimenting.

With mid-roll ads that are controlled by the platform, meaning streamers can't choose when to play, the difference between tts donation ads and mid-roll ads is getting confusing, to say the least, so add a couple more similarities to that list, both types. of ads interrupt streams at inconvenient times and streamers aren't happy with any of them, and when looked at from that perspective, five dollar donations seem a lot less egregious. Can'ttalk about current Twitch mid-roll ad rates, but on YouTube. For ad revenue, the amount you make per thousand views is lucky if you get more than five bucks, it's just something that happens on top-tier channels at some of the peak times of the year, especially when talking about videos. games, so it depends.

As to how many viewers each of these streamers had when the tts donations came in, they may have made more from that donation or at least that series of donations than they would have from a similar mid-roll ad running in the same place. . I mean, don't get me wrong, it's an unintentional mid-roll, no one wanted it placed there, but is it that different from the new policies Twitch just implemented? So Burger King is right in saying just take the fiver and be happy with it like they said in the ad because I don't know about you, but something still feels off about it.

If I'm a streamer and I don't want mid-roll ads, I just easily turn them off. all my funds can be fan funds, there are a lot of channels that don't want to accept advertising dollars and do, but with text to speech donations it's complicated, I'm sure I could disable them as well to prevent Burger King from misusing of them, but The tool was intended to be used for community engagement, not as an advertising platform. What Burger King did was insert a spam message in the middle of the stream and it's that breach of terms of service that keeps me coming back here, in essence, the streaming king campaign misused the tools of community engagement to get your message across in the middle of ongoing content, regardless of whether that came with a price tag, you are literally hijacking the stream using tools intended for others. purposes you know it is quite similar to the definition of what is known as broadcast signal intrusion.

You see, it doesn't happen too often, but starting in the 1970s and occurring even in 2017, there are occasional incidents where television, radio or satellite signals are leaked. hijacked by people looking to make a joke or send some kind of message in 1987 the playboy channel was hijacked with a religious message repent, the kingdom of heaven is near in 1986 hbo's satellite broadcast was interrupted by a man calling himself captain midnight, which is funny enough is also the name of one of my favorite movie analysis channels here on youtube. Shout out to him anyway, the hijacking was done by a guy who was frustrated by the decline of his satellite TV business at the hands of HBO, but perhaps the most iconic example of signal intrusion was the max headroom incident when A man wearing a rubber mask of a popular '80s character Max Headroom took over the signals of two television stations in Chicago to ramble incoherently, get slapped and recite the Coca-Cola catch-the-wave catchphrase of the era catch the coke wave In each of these cases, simple streaming tools were misused to interrupt an ongoing content with an unwanted message in a way that seems very similar to the king of streaming, so this type of practice is Illegal, yes, but not in the way you would do it.

I hope we're not worried about the FTC anymore, but instead we're focused on the FCC, the federal communications commission, because these types of attacks were very new at the time, the laws didn't really exist to punish you, Captain Midnight, after his HBO kidnapping being charged with the crime of transmitting without a radio license because it was actually the only thing they could catch him for and even that didn't really apply because the transmitter he used had a license anyway, eventually earning him a fee of 5,000 and one year of probation. but it prompted the FCC to update its policies and create a new code that made such outages a felony.

That means Stream King is an illegal felony. No, because once again, like those first kidnappings, we are dealing with a technological gap. The new laws in place around broadcast interference specifically address interference with satellite transmissions. There is nothing I can find that covers the interruption of an Internet-based broadcast transmission. The tldr here was the king of streaming. The laws are catching up with the way modern entertainment and advertising is produced and considering the fact that the government is still trying to figure out how to log into your hotmail, I think we have a couple of years before they start to make text-to-speech donations.

What is Twitch, guys? So it would seem that the cavalry won't be coming to save the Streamer team - even if Twitch and/or Stream Labs manage to slap Burger King on the wrist for terms of service violations, there will be no real repercussions for the corporations. who spams, excuse me, advertises via text to speech donations, at least not until the law catches up, so what's a streamer to do? How do you defend yourself without the law or technology to help? Well, here's a

theory

that streamers make. They have a very powerful tool available to them.

Shame, shame, it's how Team Stream wins the war. Think about it, the Twitch community has managed to keep individual spam and self-promotion to a dull roar. Up to this point, how to self-impose the rule? don't use someone else's stream to promote your own, it's literally in the don't column of official twitch etiquette and twitch users are usually quick to report those who violate the etiquette, so understand this, you can deal with massive corporations promoting hamburgers the same way. The way you would treat a 12 year old promoting their biweekly streams, you don't engage, report it, or simply shame them on social media until the behavior stops, the fact that a person or company donates money to your channel It doesn't mean that you have any obligation to thank them, interact with them, or even be polite.

I know that last one is going to be difficult for all Canadian streamers. Look, if a company honestly believes they're better off without a signed sponsorship deal, then. Streamers have every right to show them why they are wrong. If a streamer believes that a text-to-speech donation

break

s etiquette, they should say so and make noise about it. Heck, that's the reason I made this video in the first place. because the legal battle may not be won for some time, but the PR battle can be won right now, but hey, that's just a theory, a food theory, bon appetit.