What Happened
Maybelline is sponsoring a two-day campaign on Snapchat to reach Millennial holiday shoppers. The company is partnering with Sweet, the Snapchat-only publication created by Hearst, to launch a pop-up holiday gift guide that will run for today and Saturday. The sponsored gift guide highlights a collection of holiday gifts on Sweet’s Discover channel, interspersed with ads from the makeup brand. According to Hearst, Sweet gets about 16 million unique views a month and about one million daily. Previously, the Snapchat publisher also run a five-part themed series called “The United States of Sweet” sponsored by GE this summer.
What Brands Should Do
Snapchat’s ad business is hitting its stride as the company behind the popular messaging app files for a confidential IPO and start selling its first hardware product Spectacles (which we have managed to get two pairs ready for demo here at the Lab). This sponsored campaign serves as a good example of brands using messaging apps as a marketing channel to connect with customers. As Snapchat continues to improve its ad products to match its rapid growth, brands need to consider getting on Snapchat to reach its growing number of users via not only standard video ads, but also more unconventional ad units such as custom Geofilters and branded selfie lenses.
For more information on how brands should leverage interesting branded content to win back the increasingly ad-avoidant consumers, check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.
Source: AdWeek
Lead image courtesy of Sweet’s promotional image