On his recent visit to New Zealand, Facebook chief creative officer Mark D’Arcy spoke about how the proliferation of internet-connected mobile phones had created a new media opportunity ripe for the picking.
“A lot of the time on mobile is new time,” he said. “It’s time we’re finding. If I was waiting for you for five minutes to arrive, I’d have a five-minute media slot that didn’t exist before.”
Last night, as the action unfolded at the 50th edition of the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards, this new media opportunity was clearly at work as Kiwis across the nation contributed to over 200,500 story views of content uploaded to the Vodafone Snapchat handle during proceedings—an experience far removed from that of fans 50 years ago, who could only have seen the talent of the day if they were actually in attendance at the event.
The content uploaded to Snapchat over the course of the night included Taikia Waititi pretending his leg was a guitar, Gin Wigmore laughing about the breakage of her Tui award and Lorde walking along the red carpet into the event.
From the outset of the campaign (which was developed with support from Y&R and True), Vodafone outlined ambitions to emulate the success of the recent Coachella Snapchat camapaign, which reached 40 million people around the globe. And while the local effort was never going to be quite as big as that, the telco’s consumer director Matt Williams was very satisfied with the results.
“It’s the first time anything like this has been done in New Zealand and we were blown away by how many young people watched and engaged with our Snapchat channel on the night, and in the weeks leading up to the awards,” said Williams.
To drive Kiws to its Snapchat channel in the lead up the awards show, Vodafone launched a competition that gave two lucky Kiwis the opportunity to become official Vodafonenz Snapchat presenters on the night.
Over 600 Kiwis auditioned for the opportunity, and the winners, Timaru’s Kyra Butler and Auckland’s Brittany Robertson, were last night given VIP treatment over the course of the evening.
The interest driven by competition when combined with the real-time coverage of the event led to a total of 750,000 views of Snapchat content shared through the @vodafonenz Snapchat handle—and what’s most telling about this is that those are views that did not exist at all only a few years ago.
