How does this represent “Excellence in Engagement”?

We took a risk in presenting NFL Highlights on Snapchat in a new and unique way, and it totally paid off. The key measurement of engagement on these editions was the fact that fans kept coming back to see new updates to the story throughout the day.

It was clear we became fans go-to source, and by consistently checking-in they were obviously engaged with our content. More importantly, we got the often hard-to-reach young age demographic of 13-17 year olds to engage on our Snapchat platform. By keeping this execution on Snapchat, it forced us to condense highlights to 10s, which helped satisfy the short attention span of young audiences, and led to more engagement.

We believe we pushed the boundaries with this edition style, and hope that it continues to challenge others in the industry to utilize traditional social platforms in new and unique ways.

Objective:

In the 2018 season, we rolled out a brand new Discover Story, which served as a ground-breaking way for fans to receive and interact with publisher stories on Snapchat. Our highlights have always been a top performer on the platform, and we wanted to take it to the next level with the way we presented them. This led to the creation of our Highlights Edition: a live-updating edition that was refreshed with new plays and moments minutes after they happened. The goal of this edition was to engage young fans in a brand new way - by giving them a place to continually come back to throughout the day for the best NFL content. It also allowed them to share highlights in an organic way, on a platform they already utilize often.

Strategy & Execution:

Our team spent the entire day every Sunday identifying the biggest moments across every single game. We then pulled the footage, verticalized it, added additional information to give context to the game/play, uploaded it to our edition, and then pushed it live to our fans on Snapchat—as quickly as 10-15 minutes after the play happened. The speed and amount we updated was key to our success. Fans knew they could constantly be expecting something new, and kept them refreshing our story to see what they missed from that day's games.

We strategically chose the moments, making sure they would resonate with our youth fan base on Snapchat. We not only included the jaw-dropping plays, but also the celebrations, viral moments, mishaps, and bloopers.

We also were strategic in the way we displayed the edition. We utilized a unique logo for these editions to help fans understand they were getting a new type of content than our traditional daily edition. Also, we turned off the typical looping you see in a publisher story, which allowed fans to seamlessly watch our 40-50 topsnap story in a unique, easily consumable style—almost like watching a highlight reel for the day.

Results:

We also were strategic in the way we displayed the edition. We utilized a unique logo for Our Highlights Edition was an exemplary example of social media engagement because of the continued growth we saw in our metrics each week.

Our Highlights Edition was consistently our best-performing edition of the week in terms of unique viewers, total views, and shares. As the season went on, word began to spread that our Highlights Edition was the go-to source for the best plays and around-the-clock game updates.

We debuted our live-update Highlights Edition on the first Sunday of season (September 9th), which brought in 1.72 million unique viewers and 27.7 million topsnap views.

This success only continued as our NFL Highlights story earned an average of 1.5m unique views throughout the season. Five months later, our Super Bowl LIII Highlights edition brought in 2.2 million unique viewers and over 42 million total views.

Production

• NFL
• Snapchat

Links

•   snapchat.com/add/nfl

Credits

David Feldman
Director, Social Content
NFL

AJ Curry
Manager, Social Content
NFL

Ralph Warner
Digital Content Editor
NFL

Hayden Patterson
Designer & Animator
NFL

Blake Harvey
Preditor
NFL

Chance Brost
Video Editor
NFL