More and more brands are waking up to the importance of reaching their audience directly on the mobile – this includes innovating ways of distributing content as well as newer platforms to feature them on.
Snapchat is a unique social network for brands to explore. Its feature of limited content storage could help in pushing marketers to be more innovative in their content approach than they might be otherwise.
A good example of leveraging this Snapchat feature is Nat Geo Wild’s awareness and teaser campaign for Big Cat Week, their annual week-long event on the channel.
For five days leading up to Big Cat Week, Nat Geo Wild created a Snapchat Story – a series of images – for each day. The images were of big cats in the wild, and as users scrolled through the story, the images would fade – a hard-hitting symbolic representation of the declining numbers of these animals in the wild.
As each story ended, the screen faded to a black background with a statistic about the falling numbers in the wild. Five different big cats were featured, with a different statistic each day.
The message that Nat Geo Wild wanted to convey – that of the alarming rate with which these animals are perishing – was made all the more real by the fact that all stories on Snapchat are auto deleted after 24 hours.
The campaign was impactful, with 91% of the users viewing the story to its entirety. Nat Geo Wild received positive feedback as well, both on Snapchat and Twitter, where the campaign was cross-promoted.
Using Creative Constraints to Storytelling Advantage
Snapchat has more than a few times been at the receiving end of criticism about the kind of content that gets circulated on the network. It also isn’t looked at as a platform with the power to make a lasting social impact.
With this campaign, one can see how even Snapchat – where content is permanently deleted – can be used to create powerful, riveting content that makes people sit up and take notice. It also is an example of how it’s important to leverage a platform the new mobile generation understands and is comfortable with.
Nat Geo Wild demonstrated how with the right idea and execution, storytelling can be intelligent, concise and relevant.
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- Read about how constraints can actually be aides to creativity, in our report The Future of Creativity.
This post is a part of our monthly People’s Insights brief for April – Part 2: The Mobile & Wearable Web