Dr. Squatch on Monday announced “Speedrun: Million Dollar Mission,” a multistage contest that will dole out a $1 million in prize money in collaboration with popular streamer IShowSpeed. The contest will span 25 challenges across nine weeks in the U.S., Canada, the UK and Australia, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
The effort sees the Unilever-owned men’s grooming brand team with a content creator who has quickly emerged as a go-to partner for brands looking to engage Gen Z. The Dr. Squatch contest forgoes traditional advertising in favor of an activation designed to engage communities of consumers, taking a different tack than brands that have simply used creators, streamers and influencers in the top-down way that they previously used celebrity talent.
“We wanted to work with Speed and his team to create something that we thought would be really unique and different, and add a lot of value to his community and to our community, and social [media] in general,” Chief Brand Officer John Ludeke said. “The goal for this one was really to be very participatory, to get the community activated and to hopefully get outside of their house to do something a bit different.”
Gameplay for the “Speedrun” contest, which nods to both the streamer and a type of gaming, takes several forms. A briefcase filled with a gold bar of Dr. Squatch soap will be hidden each week in cities across the countries involved. Each week, the brand will share a livestream of and GPS coordinates to the briefcase location that will become gradually more legible as the week goes on, helping consumers to find the briefcase.
In a retail play, more than 4,000 Walmart stores in the U.S. and Canada and other select partners will become hubs for the contest, with in-store display and QR codes connecting shoppers to the game.
Additionally, Dr. Squatch will reveal weekly missions inspired by Speed’s content — like challenging a stranger to a footrace — that can be posted on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube for a chance to win a prize. Ludeke hinted that some of the challenges could be tied to in-store Walmart visits. The brand will also dole out scratch-off tickets, available for free via a microsite or with purchase of an IShowSpeed Loot Box Bundles on TikTok shop, with 25 scratchers revealing $10,000 prizes.
The prize value of the briefcases and content challenges will increase over the eight-week contest, with a $250,000 briefcase challenge serving as a grand finale. The brand hopes that as the prize values increase, so will the attention and frenzy around the contest on social media.
“People love to create content, they love to share it, they love to participate,” the executive said. “We wanted to give people another mechanism where they could participate and have fun.”
“Speedrun” will run through Oct. 31. It was developed in partnership with Applied MSCHF, the agency arm of the Brooklyn-based production company behind such viral stunts as the big red boots and Lil Nas X’s controversial Satan Shoes. Echobend Productions and director Kyle Beiermeister provided additional creative support.
Creators and C-suite buy-in
Dr. Squatch has been working with IShowSpeed and his team since April 2025 to figure out the best way to bring a partnership to life. The contest finds synergies between the brand’s mission to inspire and educate men to be happier, healthier and choose better-for-you products with the streamer’s enthusiasm, energy and desire to do things on his own terms.
“He's out in the world, he's traveling, he's meeting people, he's always in a different location and he just brings an enormous amount of positive energy to almost every situation that he's in,” Ludeke said.
While Dr. Squatch did shoot a basic set of ads to help launch the contest, more of the brand’s marketing spend will be around supporting a creator community that will help bring hundreds of pieces of content to the social ecosystem.
“We're going to be working with hundreds of different creators and influencers that are going to be out there also participating in the challenges to show people how it can be done, and to help build that content flywheel,” Ludeke said. “Instead of pushing hard from top down, the goal here is to be a lot more bottom up.”
However, spending $1 million on prize money rather than traditional media has some risk involved and requires navigation of the C-suite.
“It's pretty easy to calculate how many impressions we could generate, what that ROI was going to be, but from the beginning, the goal for this campaign was not to focus purely on standard metrics and to buy as much ad content as we could,” Ludeke said.
For Dr. Squatch, “Speedrun” is the culmination of a big-swing approach that has included a masculinity-focused content world, self-help hypnosis and racy campaigns starring Sydney Sweeney and Megan Fox. First as a challenger and now as a Unilever subsidiary, the brand has looked to educate and entertain, usually without traditional advertising. “Speedrun” builds on that approach, while tying into an uptick in brand-led, in-real-life experiences.
“Post-pandemic, I think people value [IRL] more than ever,” Ludeke said. “We're just inundated with content and ads everywhere, all the time, on all platforms. We think that people are getting tired of it.”
