Objective: To compare and evaluate the prevalence of food and beverage marketing on the livestreaming platforms Twitch, Facebook Gaming, and YouTube Gaming, as well as examine growth of food and beverage marketing on these platforms over a 17-month period of data collection. Design: Cross-sectional data was analyzed across three livestreaming platforms and six food and beverage categories: alcohol, candy, energy drinks, snacks, sodas, and restaurants. Setting: Stream titles of livestreamed events as well as corresponding hours watched on Twitch, Facebook Gaming, and YouTube Gaming. Participants: None Results: There were significant differences between the use of food and beverage brand mentions in stream titles across all three studied platforms (p<0.05), as well as hours watched across platforms (p<0.05). Energy drinks dominated food and beverage brand mentions across platforms, followed by restaurants, soda, and snacks. All platforms demonstrated growth over the 17-month data collection period. Post-hoc analyses revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted both immediate and sustained growth across all platforms, with the greatest impact observed on the Twitch platform. Conclusions: Food and beverage marketing as measured through stream titles is widely prevalent across the three most popular livestreaming platforms, particularly for energy drinks. Food marketing on these platforms experienced growth over the past 17-months which was accelerated substantially by the COVID-19 pandemic. Future work should assess the sustained impact this growth may have on marketing practices and eating behavior.

Objective: Assess viewer engagement of a food advertising campaign on the livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, a social media platform that allows creators to livestream content and communicate with their audience in real-time. Design: Observational analysis of chat comments across the Twitch platform containing the word “Wendy’s” or “Wendys” during a 5-day ad campaign compared to two 5-day non-campaign time periods. Comments were categorized as positive, negative, or neutral in how their sentiment pertained to the brand Wendy’s. Setting: Twitch chatrooms. Participants: None. Results: There were significantly more chatroom messages related to the Wendy’s brand during the campaign period. When considering all messages, the proportion of messages was statistically different (x2=1417.41, p <0.001) across time periods with a higher proportion of neutral and positive messages and a lower proportion of negative messages during the campaign compared to the comparison periods. Additionally, the proportion of negative messages following the campaign was lower than before the campaign. When considering only positive and negative messages, the proportion of messages was statistically different (x2=366.38, p <0.001) across each time period with a higher proportion of positive messages and a lower proportion of negative messages during the campaign when compared to the other time periods. Additionally, there was a higher proportion of positive messages and a lower portion of negative messages following the campaign when compared to before the campaign. Conclusions: This study demonstrates the impact and sustained impact of a fast-food brand ad campaign on brand engagement on the livestreaming platform Twitch.

While different crowdsourcing platforms promote remote data collection, experiments in the immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) research community are predominantly performed in person. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has forced researchers in different disciplines, including iVR, to seriously consider remote studies. In this paper, we present a remote study using the Immersive Virtual Alimentation and Nutrition (IVAN) application, designed to educate users about food-energy density and portion size control. We report on the results of a remote experiment with 45 users using the IVAN app. In IVAN, users actively construct knowledge about energy density by manipulating virtual food items, and explore the concept of portion size control through hypothesis testing and assembling virtual meals in iVR. To explore the feasibility of conducting remote iVR studies using an interactive health-related application for nutrition education, two conditions were devised (interactive vs. passive). The results demonstrate the feasibility of conducting remote iVR studies using health-related applications. Furthermore, the results also indicate that regardless of level of interactivity learners significantly improved their knowledge about portion size control after using the IVAN (p &lt; 0.0001). Adding interactivity, however, suggests that the perceived learning experience of users could be partially affected. Learners reported significantly higher scores for immediacy of control in the interactive condition compared to those in the passive condition (p &lt; 0.05). This study demonstrates the feasibility of conducting an unsupervised remote iVR experiment using a complex and interactive health-related iVR app.

IntroductionThe modern eating environment has been implicated as a driving force of the obesity epidemic. Mixed reality applications may improve traditional methodological assessments of eating behavior by improving the ecological validity of the laboratory setting.MethodsResearch experts evaluated the utility and ecological validity of a mixed reality application that allowed immersion within virtual environments through utilizing the passthrough cameras of the head mounted display to view and interact with real foods. An initial evaluation was conducted that involved three virtual environments: a traditional laboratory booth, a non-textured restaurant, and a full-textured restaurant. The feedback from the initial evaluation was used to create a new virtual restaurant environment and a subsequent evaluation was conducted.ResultsNearly all research experts suggested adding social cues such as people and background noise to create a more authentic and ecologically valid experience. The experts scored the new virtual restaurant environment to be more acceptable than eating or conducting research in a sensory booth but scored lower when compared to conducting research in a real-world restaurant setting.DiscussionThe results of this evaluation suggest that mixed reality applications may be a new methodology to assess environmental influences of eating behavior and may be a promising direction for eating behavior and sensory science research.

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