State Farm was so confident in The Gamerhood’s second installment that it built a 50,000-square-foot set featuring hydraulic lifts, catapults, vacuums and other devices and obstacles for its stars to navigate. There are four gaming areas set up as tiny homes, and the entire neighborhood requires 44 cameras, nearly 175 team members and more than 100 screens to create each episode.
State Farm also created interactive games and trivia for viewers and gave away prizes including gift cards worth up to $500. The Gamerhood’s players, meanwhile, are each competing for a $100,000 donation to the nonprofit organization of their choice. Even runners up receive $10,000 for their causes, which include Habitat for Humanity, Feeding America, Junior Achievement and The American Red Cross.
Thus far, the investment has paid off. Where last year’s debut episode drew 340,000 viewers on State Farm’s Twitch stream, this year’s garnered close to 500,000, with another 36,000 streaming on YouTube. Through the first four episodes of the series, State Farm is averaging more than 482,000 viewers on Twitch and another 27,000 on YouTube—none of which includes those viewing the streams of the participants themselves.
But is it necessarily a better result than State Farm would see from more traditional marketing channels?
“For engagement, chatter, growing, Jake’s fan base, growing affinity to our brand with a younger generation … oh my gosh, yes,” Griffin said. “We are thinking very differently than simply television commercials.”
The cheat code
State Farm exists in a crowded market of insurers that all want their spokesperson/character drilled into the public consciousness. Last year, State Farm and its affiliates spent $1.01 billion on advertising. That’s more than the $950 million than Allstate and the soothing timbre of Dennis Haysbert, but less than the nearly $1.3 billion spent by Geico and its gecko or the $1.7 billion Progressive spent on the Flo cinematic universe.
But State Farm’s foray into popular technology and the culture surrounding it has separated it and Jake from their policy-peddling contemporaries. State Farm has sponsored gaming’s Rocket League Championship Series and League of Legends. It also sponsored esports athlete and Fortnite streamer DrLupo in 2019 before placing Jake himself into NBA2K22’s The City.
In the metaverse, it opened State Farm Park in iHeartLand and introduced itself to 5.5 million players, including 3.2 million unique visitors, 1.6 million from Roblox and 1.3 million from Fortnite. Its forays into social media replaced a Super Bowl ad with its 2023 Big Game #StateFarmStadiumChallenge with TikToker Khaby Lame that produced 220 million views on Lame’s TikTok in seven days and got 18,100 to comment for a chance to be in one of his future posts.