Livestream Production

Project background

I was the Manager of Social Media Marketing at Sideshow and was tasked with humanizing the brand.

Sideshow had a video production studio that produced beautiful marketing pieces and professional livestream programming.

However, I realized after first virtual convention in 2020 our online community connected better with our more casual livestreams hosted by people who were not professional on-screen personalities.

Creative process

As the Manager of Social Media Marketing, I realized that my biggest asset was the social media team that I had assembled. They were not professional on-screen personalities, but they were all geek culture fans themselves, so they were relatable and authentic in their excitement over the products that Sideshow sold.

I set up my social media team with basic livestream equipment and simple consumer-level livestream software that was easy to learn. I organized my team based on their strengths, including on-camera personalities, engineers, producers, and live comment moderators. I had the team execute a frequent schedule of casual livestreams in the Facebook Group, consisting of free-form chats about current geek culture happenings.

Through these low-stakes livestreams, my team was able to sharpen their skills and connect with the audience in a more authentic and relatable manner. As a result, I was able to incorporate casual interactive livestreams into all of the marketing team's events, using templates and show formats to make the process scalable.

Final results

These livestreams became the mainstay of our events and helped to build brand connection and loyalty in a way that polished marketing efforts couldn't achieve. The benefits of this style of livestreaming were long-term and weren't easily tracked to direct product sales, but we saw a steady growth in audience size and livestream engagement month after month.

Before launching our casual livestream campaign, Sideshow's YouTube account had less than 50k subscribers, and two years later, it reached over 240k subscribers.