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ASB fishes where the fish are with Snapchat challenges

Every year around this time, banks attempt to grease up the young’uns heading off to expand/erode their minds at University. But banks are rarely at the top of the priorities list at this stage of life and erecting a makeshift tent and handing out branded pens at a festival or over Orientation Week just doesn’t cut it anymore. So ASB is running a Snapchat campaign called Snap Scholarships—replete with the obligatory prizes—to try and lure them in. 

ASB has long been regarded as one of the most socially savvy banks in this market—and, according to the Financial Brand, the world, with the bank making it into the ten brands to watch, the Top 35 Banks on Facebook and Top 35 Banks on Twitter. It’s managed plenty of firsts in the social and mobile space and it found plenty of success with its Like Loan campaign, which tied the interest rate of a home loan to the number of likes. Now it’s become one of the few Kiwi brands to embrace Snapchat, which Digiday says has gone from “a niche forum where early-adopter brands could experiment” to “a legitimate marketing platform in its own right”. 

Punters need to add ASBBank on Snapchat and it will release two challenges each week on the My Story section. Each challenge will be open for 24 hours, and those who nail it and enter their details then go into the draw to win anything from McDonald’s vouchers to concert tickets. In total there are 22 scholarships to be won between 5 January 2015 and 20 March 2015. Every challenge entered correctly also gets one entry into a draw to win $10,000, which will be deposited into an ASB Tertiary account. 

Late last year, NZTA and Clemenger BBDO were lauded for Tinnyvision, a clever Snapchat campaign that aimed to show young people how marijuana use could affect their driving. 

The account documented a group of four Kiwi stoners mucking around, smoking weed and doing funny stuff. But the story took a turn when the four went out for a drive to get takeaways. Shot from the back seat, it felt like just another one of the group’s videos, until they hit a pedestrian. The video is immediately followed by another snap with a warning of the dangers of drug driving.​​

Vodafone also embraced the social messaging application during last year’s southern O week celebrations as a way to have a stronger presence than the temporary stand that companies usually occupy on campuses. It was also a targeted way to trial the platform and assess the results for future use, said social media head Mike Wilson.

“We want to engage with students and the opportunity at both campuses there is quite limited. We started discussing what offers and plans are relevant to the students. We said, ‘we need to do something that gets awareness up of what we’re doing and getting them back into the makeshift stall’.”

Vodafone took to its social channels to ask fans to add the company on Snapchat and built its following from 48 to 400 users in a week. The telco used the application to send snaps to those who added the company, assigning them a task and revealing the location of a lycra-suited ‘morph man’ carrying helium balloons with prizes in them.

The prizes included high end and basic smartphones and speakers, which could be redeemed at Vodafone’s campus pop up store. Skinny Mobile also tested Snapchat to give away mobile credit last year in a campaign with Auckland agency Young and Shand.

Snapchat, which turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook in 2013, grew its audience from around 16.3 million in 2013 to 25.3 million in 2014, according to comScore. Its first ad format, Brand Story, which is “comprised of up to 20 seconds of an advertisers’ photo and video content and delivered alongside Snapchat’s organic Story product”, was launched in October last year. And since November, advertisers have also been able to sponsor Snapchat Our Stories, “collections of user-submitted photos and video that form a multi-perspective window into geo-centric events. With the inclusion of “brought to you by” messaging and advertiser-contributed pieces of 5 to 10-second photo and video content woven throughout, advertisers are engaging with consumers via a contextual marketing experience.” 

Adweek reports it isn’t budging from its $750,000 fee to advertise, and, given the ads disappear, some brands are balking at that price. But, as it’s one of the fastest growing social platforms and can offer access to the hard-to-reach youth market, it’s got plenty to offer. 

Millward Brown’s digital division released a study on Snapchat advertising early this year, and a number of US campaigns performed well with both users and marketers. 

  • Check out some of the best Snapchat brand campaigns here

Millward Brown Digital’s analysis has shown that the campaigns were received positively by Snapchat users: 60% of ‘Our Stories’ and 44% of ‘Brand Stories’ viewers enjoyed the ads. These levels of receptivity are more than 3x the norm; according to Millward Brown’s 2014 AdReaction study, only 17% of US consumers find ads on their smartphone device very or somewhat favorable.

In addition to the positive user reception, the research found that Snapchat’s first six advertising campaigns had a significant positive impact on key brand metrics including ad awareness and brand favorability. Across Snapchat’s two ad formats, on average advertisers saw a 16 point lift in ad awareness, which ranked in the top quarter of similar mobile campaigns according to Millward Brown Digital’s mobile MarketNorms, a database consisting of more than 550 mobile marketing campaigns.  

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