Popular Twitch streamer Koji knows the recipe for brands to connect with fandoms

What does it take to become Twitch-famous? Welcome to Going Live, a series in which popular Twitch creators explain how they found their communities and cultivated a space where viewers, streamers, and brands can connect in real time.

What Koji has created over the past few years is his own version of Twitch miso soup. For example, during a stream of Among Us, he fanboys when a viewer shares their excitement about an upcoming season of Black Mirror. He wishes the stream a happy Pride Month. He catches up with viewers about his favorite kind of ice cream, seamlessly dropping his discount code for the brand, for those who want to join him in him in eating his favorite frozen treat—the type of collaboration where the brand ties in perfectly with the streamer. After every interaction, the chat lights up with congratulations or rainbow emojis or words of thanks. His streams are more intimate and personal than anything game-related. He calls out viewers by name, thanking them for months of subscribing.

Koji has built a brand on his channel that is a bastion of comfort and kindness amid a larger gaming culture that has its fair share of toxic corners. While other streamers are known for streaming a specific title, he has meticulously developed a brand that focuses on his relationship with his viewers.

With now over 81K followers, Koji’s brand strategy remains clear: create an environment for his fans to watch, engage, and commune with one another where everyone feels involved. That driving force is part of everything he does: from the way he manages his chats to the brands he involves himself with.

Before the pandemic, Koji worked as a freelance visual artist—photography, videography, and everything in between. Thriving in the role, he decided to relocate from London to Bali for a slower pace of life. A self-described “lover of branding,” Koji says a large part of his work before streaming consisted of helping brands “be cooler on social media.”

“Even as a kid, I was always fascinated by branding and marketing, especially the branding aspect,” he remembers, saying he would dream up 50 businesses a week in his head, coming up with names and what the logos might look like. He had money saved up, which helped when the pandemic hit. Opportunities for creative work waned and he missed his family, so he moved back to London and started looking into Twitch. He’d streamed years before but had since given up the dream of becoming a full-time streamer. With little work and only a bit of savings, he reimagined his COVID-19 relocation as his second chance at another dream.

From the early days, Koji knew that branding would be important. “If you stream the same thing every day, I think you’re more likely to grow an audience because they know exactly what to expect,” he says. Koji isn’t known for streaming one particular game, which can be difficult when it comes to developing a brand. Instead, he’s opted for inclusivity and kindness.

“I definitely made a huge, conscious effort to incorporate my personality into everything I did in streams. When I first started streaming, though, I streamed Valor for like eight hours a day, and I very quickly was like, OK, this is not gonna work,” he says. While game-specific streams are one way to tap into an already-established audience, Koji’s approach has cultivated a fandom that is based more in community and less in one specific type of game. Koji’s approach gets at something more nuanced about the gaming community.

Video game players are fans of 5.8 different game genres on average, and 70% of fans agreed that their fandom and its community are part of their everyday life, according to Anatomy of Hype, a report from Twitch Ads, Amazon Ads, and Crowd DNA. Koji’s stream is about that community and the lifestyle of gaming fandom. What he’s trying to do is to cultivate a place for those people to find one another and make deeper connections.

“The world was a pretty rough place at the time when I started streaming,” Koji says. “I remember one of my first goals as a streamer was to try and make strangers meet in the chat and play games together because [connecting with people online is] what I struggled with so much.”

The key to Koji’s brand and the community he’s built is the candor he shares with his viewers. In the middle of a stream, Koji opens up about his generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and how it contributes to his phobias. The chat begins to light up with people who also have GAD and how they’ve managed it. Somehow, this stream of Layers of Fear has become a support group—but a laid-back one where all the things that might bring you anxiety suddenly don’t seem so daunting.

As Koji notes, the stream he’s cultivated is one that prioritizes authenticity and friendship and kindness. That is, in some ways, a more difficult brand to maintain than one focused on a particular game. Much like the 22-day subathon, viewers are expecting a level of consistency in the way Koji maintains his stream, the people who interact with it, and the brands he works with. Recently, he saw a lull in engaged viewers. But Koji stays the course—remaining true to his brand is more important than trying gimmicks that might have short-term rewards but would alienate his community.

In terms of sticking to his brand, sponsorships are also important. His favorites have been the ones that align most closely with who he is, like when he livestreamed three short films for Coca-Cola, in collaboration with the filmmakers, during the holiday season. “Those streams were perfect for me because obviously I love filmmaking, and I love Christmas,” he says. “And most of my viewers are very similar in the sense that, even if they don’t celebrate Christmas, they can appreciate like those cozy Christmas vibes.”

For Koji, it’s not simply about the right brand to work with, but the correct means of activating that campaign. “I genuinely think that the campaigns involving the brand in a fun way are better. Chatters are still getting to be immersed and involved, instead of listening to why they should just buy something,” he says. A personal favorite of his was an activation he did with Stock X, an online clothing and shoe reseller. When the company initially pitched him the idea, they wanted him to stream from their booth at a Twitch convention in Amsterdam. For Koji, that didn’t feel on-brand. Instead, he pitched that they let Koji make his way around the convention center and ask real people to walk him through their outfits.

“The whole campaign was basically about like loving yourself in the clothes you’re in and being confident and happy because of the clothes you’re wearing,” he says. “I thought it’d be great because my audience at home will get to walk around the Twitch convention, too.”

As Koji has seen, it’s important to fans that brands do the legwork when trying to engage with audiences, as well as appeal to them in ways that Koji’s audience finds valuable. Anatomy of Hype reports that 63% of fans agree that any brand can get involved with fandoms as long as they make an effort to understand them. And understanding them is paramount—according to Amazon Ads research, From Ads to Zeitgeist, 7 in 10 consumers want to see more genuine, real stories in media that reflect different cultures.

“I always try and stress this to brands because Twitch is just a different kettle of fish when it comes to advertising,” says Koji. “My community knows me, so there are opportunities I stay away from because my brand is entirely built on authenticity and wholesome things. For me, it wouldn’t be right to advertise.”

Even after these years of building his community, Koji remains humble about his success. “I don’t know if it’s imposter syndrome or if I just know how many other people are out there streaming on Twitch every day. Statistically, I think I was probably more likely to walk outside and get struck by lightning than I was to be able to turn this into a career, you know?” he jokes.

“But in the early days,” Koji says, “I would stream my hours and spend a couple hours networking on social media channels, doing another streamer’s chats. I just wanted to make it work because I’ve never felt so motivated and passionate as I did making it work. It’s really hard to grasp and accept that, holy crap, this is my job.”