Snapchat campaign success: What brands need to know
Video has quickly become the best way for brands to connect with their audiences. It's very clear when you look at the numbers that a massive amount of video is being consumed daily. Snapchat has surpassed 8 billion daily video views and has well over a 100 million active users.
Even with stats like those, it can be difficult to think about putting time, energy, and budget into creating this kind of ephemeral content, which will only be visible for a few hours. But this kind of content is where the eyeballs are.
Snapchat is where you really have the opportunity to be authentic with your audience.
What kind of work are brands creating that resonates with Snapchat users?
One of the ways brands effectively use Snapchat is by creating lenses. This is the addition of sounds, graphics, and filters to users' snaps. United States brand Taco Bell did this with massive success earlier this year to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.
They created a lens to make your head look like a giant taco, and it was viewed more than 224 million times. After all, who doesn't want to be seen that way? Snapchat has said that this one campaign generated 12.5 years' worth of play on the day it was active.
Another campaign that did similarly well was Gatorade's campaign for the US Super Bowl in 2016. They created a lens that showed a bucket of Gatorade being dumped over users' heads. Again, who wouldn't want that? Its popularity didn't end when the football did, with many more instances of it being used long after the championship came to an end.
Taking full advantage of Snapchat's disappearing messages was the 'Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation' campaign. Self-destructing messages are, after all, a defining feature of the Mission Impossible movies. The campaign featured 24-hour challenges. Each mission was introduced by Tom Cruise.
The top submissions were then shown off across social media channels to reward entrants and to encourage further participation. This campaign earned 65 million impressions across all channels.
How to connect with a younger, more tech-savvy audience
For BBC's Panorama TV show, this meant taking their messages to Snapchat. After all, teens and millennials are looking at their phones constantly, so why not show them something of value?
They documented the journey of migrants from Greek Islands to Western Europe. They showed in real-time what these migrants go through on a daily basis. The production team had to quickly produce content as situations arose, keeping them nimble and on their toes.
This was remarkable as it brought a serious news issue to a platform not usually associated with this type of content and to an audience who would not normally tune into Panorama.
Adidas ran a successful Snapchat campaign that also aimed to connect with younger audiences. It allowed users to use Snapchat to add colour and patterns to an otherwise all-white outfit. A number of winning designers were brought to the brand's headquarters where they were able to bring their designs to life.
These campaigns show that brands need to think creatively about using Snapchat. These examples show that when brands appeal to their audience in the way they enjoy consuming content, great things can happen.
*This article originally appeared on Media Update.