Ninja Turtles and Pizza Hut serve on Twitch

Pizza Hut has partnered with the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie to bring its tie-up to its long-running Twitch livestream series. The brand transformed a popular VTuber into a purple-masked Donatello, the biggest gamer of the turtles.

VTubers, which is short for ‘virtual YouTuber’, is an online entertainer who uses an avatar generated using computer graphics, instead of their actual appearance in videos. Computer-generated avatars are incredibly popular figures on Twitch— and many of these younger consumers are difficult to reach through traditional channels. Another great example of advertisers tapping into these avatar options was Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes who partnered in 2022 with Twitch’s Brand Partnership Studio to transform Tony the Tiger into an interactive VTuber.

The activation was part of Pizza Hut’s “Friday Night Bites” effort, which it launched on Twitch in November 2020 during a heightened period of at-home activations due to pandemic-related restrictions. Each of the show’s first five episodes received over 1 million live viewers, for more than 5.4 million total views and more than 26 million minutes watched.

To encourage consumers to participate in the “Turtles”-themed livestream, the brand ran a “What the Hut Challenge” mini-game that challenges the guest VTuber to guess an image as it is slowly revealed by digitally removing slices of a pizza that is covering the image. The faster the image was guessed, the more rewards participants would receive. In addition to a co-branded TV spot, Pizza Hut also featured in several scenes as part of an in-movie integration.