In late July, the National Football League (NFL) announced that they would be extending their partnership with Snapchat for an additional two years. Snap and the NFL first entered a partnership in 2015, providing fans with unique NFL Live Stories that would be featured on the Discover page within the Snapchat app. The NFL was the first sports league to receive its own Snapchat Discover Channel. This channel provided stories, which combined game footage, behind-the-scenes video from the NFL official story, unique team and player content as well as footage from fans in the stadium. Behind-the-scenes footage captured moments such as the pre-game huddle, up-close videos of their favourite players warming up, and sideline footage. In turn, this provided Snap users with a broad narrative of each game and enabled them to feel involved in the action.
The NFL is specifically interested in the Gen Z/Millennial generations who use Snapchat. According to NFL Communications, throughout the 2017-18 season, roughly 52 million unique viewers watched NFL content on Snap; 70% of these users were under the age of 25. Additionally, during Super Bowl LII the NFL’s scoreboard filter (which updated live with the score throughout the game) was viewed more than 575 million times.
In order to take advantage of this immensely large following, and to further engage the younger demographic for the 2018-19 season, a Sunday Publisher Story will be introduced. This story will include a mix of ‘best of’ game highlights and breaking news. On Sundays, posts will be updated every hour, many of which are being curated directly for Snap.
With NFL content available on the Discover page and past editions of stories available via the search feature, users are easily able to access a wide range of exclusive NFL video footage. Additional creative features are now available on the platform for the coming season, including Snap Shows, E-Commerce capabilities and Shoppable AR.
Snap Shows
Snap shows are a recent addition to the platform and are 3-5 minute long videos that can be found in the Discover page under ‘Shows’. The NFL is currently in conversation with Snap about the potential of producing another show. Previously, the league has produced three original Snapchat Shows: ‘The NFL Show’ which was a recap show that aired during the 2016-17 season, ‘One Shot’ featured the lead up to the NFL draft in 2017, and ‘Football Town’ about Georgia’s Valdosta High School football team making its first championship run in 19 years, which ran most recently during the 2017-18 season.
E-Commerce
Snapchat recently added an integration with SeatGeek in June, which brings the first integrated ticket-buying experience to Snapchat. Through Snapcodes or the Snapchat Story, users are able to swipe up to buy tickets, enabling the entire purchase experience to take place without the user ever leaving the app.
Shoppable AR
Snapchat launched shoppable augmented reality lenses in April, which adds a button to a sponsored lens. Once the button is tapped, the user is brought to a site, shown longer form video content or prompted for an app install, depending on the goal of the campaign. Utilizing this feature allows marketers to specifically target the younger demographic and drive a desired user behaviour. Peter Sellis, Director of Revenue Product at Snapchat, states that more than half of the population of the U.S. aged 13-34 plays with Snap’s AR lenses weekly. This gives brands the opportunity to leverage Snap’s unique platform to drive real and measurable ROI, whether it’s through sales, downloads, lead generation or video views.
Geofilter Studio will be sure to continue to update on Snapchat’s recent partnerships, new features, and recent developments. If you missed our last blog post, Snapshot of Snapchat, you can read it here.
References:
https://nflcommunications.com/Pages/National-Football-League-Extends-Partnership-with-Snapchat.aspx
https://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-shows-what-are-they-2017-5
https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/18/snapchat-launches-shoppable-augmented-reality-feature-in-lenses/
https://www.sporttechie.com/nfl-inks-new-multi-year-content-partnership-with-snapchat/
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/07/seatgeek-snapchat/
Cover Image:
http://www.mdbcomm.com/blog/snapchat-and-the-nfl
