Snapchat, the Rio 2016 Olympics, and the Fight for the Millennial Viewer

Snapchat, the Rio 2016 Olympics, and the Fight for the Millennial Viewer

The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro is around the corner, and if history is any precedent, it will be one of the world’s largest and most-watched sporting events. In 2012, the London Games attracted 3.6 billion viewers worldwide, meaning more than one-third of the world’s population tuned in to watch an Olympic event at least once.

While the size and concentrated nature of the event provides an incredible opportunity for global broadcasters, media houses, and marketers to reach a huge and diverse audience, there is one group that remains stubbornly indifferent to the Olympics – young people. Between 2008 and 2012, the median age of Summer Olympics viewers increased from 46.9 to 48.2. This year, however, the network airing the Games in the United States is pulling out all the stops to engage American youth.

With less than 100 days left until the start of Rio 2016, NBC is rolling out its most expansive marketing campaign yet, using TV ad spots, social media, and online video. Working to the network’s advantage is the fact that this is only the second summer Olympics to take place during the age of social media, and the first one to take place in the Americas since the Atlanta Games in 1996. This means that NBC will be able to broadcast and stream events that occurred at awkward times during previous Olympics live at prime viewing times. By live-streaming events on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, the network hopes to pull in young viewers.

But NBC’s efforts to reach younger viewers go beyond broadcasting on hip platforms. In 2015, the network’s parent company, NBCUniversal invested $200 million in BuzzFeed, whose target demographic is much younger than the traditional NBC viewer. The network is now using the relationship to its advantage, partnering with BuzzFeed to create Millennial-friendly features about the Olympics to share on social channels.

NBCUniversal also recently partnered with the photo and video messaging app Snapchat to leverage the service’s Live Stories feature, which draws anywhere from 10 to 20 million Millennial eyeballs a day. Going a step beyond regular Snapchat stories, Live Stories weave together Snaps from hundreds of different users into a single composite.

Using Live Stories will allow Snapchat users attending U.S. Olympic Team Trial competitions and the Rio Games to participate and contribute by sharing photo and video Snaps into one collective, Snapchat-curated story. The network hopes that younger users will take an interest in athletes’ travails through the app and then follow their on-field performance and progress on television.

“Snapchat is showing us that there’s certain content you can’t fake,” says Bruno D’Angelo, VP of Creative Strategy for Ideal H+K Strategies, a leading PR agency based in São Paulo, Brazil. “We’re trying to get influencers that really speak to young people, and pair them with the events – it’s less about live-producing content and more about letting people use their screens to express themselves in an authentic way.”

In early May, Ideal piloted its first Snapchat campaign for the Olympics. The agency commissioned five local influencers who produced more than 18 minutes of Snapchat content for the Olympic Torch Lighting Ceremony in Geneva. “They used the platform to produce content about the culture surrounding the event,” said Vitor Vieira, Director of Business Intelligence at Ideal. “We were impressed with how they were using the app to actually experience things.” The campaign did well, with over 1 million post engagements with the Snapchat story during the event.

More than anything, NBCUniversal’s play for younger people is a step forward in adapting the Olympics experience to a growing audience of digital natives. Simply airing the event on television won’t be enough to draw in young users – and if those young users don’t form memories of watching the Games and cheering for their favorite athletes now, it’s unlikely they’ll still be watching on any platform 20 years from now. Snapchat’s ability to pull together a wide variety of consumer-created content into a single, curated whole is perfect for major live events, allowing users to view them from a more democratic perspective. With such a strong push behind it, the Snapchat campaign is likely to set a precedent for how we watch global events in the future.

posted by Magnify Team | July 15, 2016@ http://www.hkstrategies.com/snapchat-rio-2016-olympics-fight-millennial-viewer/

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