RBC’s filter on Snapchat shows you celebrating at the Olympic games in Rio.
Social media star Snapchat is ready to compete for ad dollars for the first time at the Olympic Games – and Canada's biggest company is among the many high-profile corporations joining its team.
Starting with the first events this weekend, advertisers will be trying to capture attention on TV and on much smaller screens, as well. That makes the next three weeks an important time for Snapchat. This is the first Games since the mobile app – which allows people to send photo and video messages to friends and to watch content from media outlets and others – announced a little over a year ago that it was opening up its service to advertisers.
For Royal Bank of Canada, one of the first major Canadian brands to experiment with a Snapchat campaign, it is an opportunity to connect with a younger audience.
"As a brand that typically connects with consumers when they are adults, one of the needs we see is to engage people early on in a fun and authentic way," said Mary DePaoli, chief brand and communications officer for RBC.
Snapchat's big sell to marketers is that its advertising tools are more interactive than those of other social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. One example is the "Lens," which allows people taking photos or videos of themselves to digitally transform themselves into anything from a cartoon dog to an alien. For a fee, Snapchat will sometimes include a sponsored Lens to share an advertiser's message through its service. This weekend, a Lens sponsored by RBC, which is an official Olympic sponsor, will allow people to share a video of themselves in a Canadian flag headband under a shower of confetti and a "Go Canada Go" banner. The RBC logo appears below.
This kind of investment – particularly from one of Canada's big five banks, which tends to be more conservative in its marketing approach – is a sign of Snapchat's growing legitimacy as an advertising vehicle. The application says it has 150 million daily users, many of whom skew younger than users on other social networks.
When the platform first launched ads, marketers were dubious about its ability to measure the effectiveness of campaigns. Since then, it has signed 10 new measurement partnerships with firms including Nielsen, Millward Brown and Google. While RBC's marketing department was interested in the possibilities of advertising with Snapchat roughly 18 months ago, the improvement in measurement is what finally attracted its ad dollars.
Other advertisers have also jumped on board. Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd.-owned brand Sport Chek is also planning to advertise on Snapchat during the Games. According to Snapchat, which declined requests for an interview for this story, other advertisers in the United States will be using Lenses, Geofilters (an overlay for photos and videos for specific locations), and video ads that play on the screen when people watch "Stories" from media outlets and others.
This week, Instagram launched a "Stories" feature similar to the format of Snapchat's "Stories" section, and it has already attracted advertisers. The prevalence of those little screens in our daily lives has awoken marketers to the need for mobile advertising strategies, especially when it comes to younger people who spend more time on their phones than anyone. So while ad spending for the lucrative TV broadcasts of the Games has hardly dried up, more advertisers are also directing their investments toward mobile applications.
Snapchat ran its first sponsored Lens in the fall of 2015 to promote The Peanuts Movie for Twentieth Century Fox. Since then, brands including Taco Bell, Beats by Dre, Gatorade and Cadbury have jumped on board. Recently, Universal Pictures used the platform to promote the movie Purge: Election Year by allowing users to transform themselves into a Statue of Liberty figure with glowing Xs in place of their eyes.
This kind of advertising may seem like a bit of fun, but Snapchat says its model beats other social networks because people are actually interacting with the brand content; literally placing an ad over their own faces. That's important for brands because while people resist advertising messages, they are more inclined to pay attention to content that comes from friends and loved ones. Brand recommendations that come from friends are more than twice as influential as any other source, research has shown.
The question remains, however: While transforming one's head into a Taco Bell taco or applying L'Oréal makeup to a selfie makes sense for the younger people who gravitate to Snapchat, is a financial institution really the right brand fit?
"How can any sector that is not naturally skewed toward youth be relevant? The key is understanding where your audience is," Ms. DePaoli said. "It allows us to show personality, and to connect in a human way that tells a story, long before you talk about product."
The hope for RBC is to simply build awareness among younger people, so that when they age and are making investment decisions or looking for a mortgage, that brand is already familiar.
"We are spending the same amount [as usual] on the [Olympics] TV broadcast, and we have increased our spend in social," Ms. DePaoli said. "We have specific strategies in each channel in terms of how we engage each consumer. … They are complementary."