12 Apr 2024 | The Media Leader Staff

Snapchat is growing its creator ecosystem for the Olympics

The Media Leader Podcast

2024 is chock-full of major cultural moments that people will be discussing across social media and brands will want to be advertising against.

For Snapchat, which is actively looking to become a destination for news consumption, such a bumper year could bring upside for user engagement. As the platform looks to continue building partnerships with publishers and creators, Lucy Luke, Snap’s UK head of partnerships, described in a recent episode of The Media Leader Podcast its strategy of investing in “shoulder content” around major sporting events like the Olympics, Paralympics and Wimbledon.

She expressed excitement for working closer with journalists and, increasingly, creators.

Listen using the player or read an edited transcript below:

Transcript

The Media Leader: How would you describe Snap’s future plans for partnerships? You’ve been in your position for two years now; you’re well-ingrained at this point. I’m curious how you’re looking to expand or if you’re looking to expand the roster of partners that you guys are working with?

Or the different options that you can give them and that goes beyond getting the communication of getting people on board and explaining to them the best practices, but in terms of just the number of partners that you’re working with.

Lucy Luke: Absolutely. So, in 2024, again, we have some big cultural moments. The Olympics I spoke about earlier — there is a lot of work going into making sure that we have highlights for those hardcore Olympic fans.

But also, as I said earlier, those content creators, producers — maybe they’re a smaller company that are producing content in and around this moment, that can bring a different aspect to it, so it feels really inclusive on the platform.

Whether you’re tapping into music, fashion, the fan moments from this event — we call it “shoulder content”. It’s that content that can sit alongside that official Olympic content.

I’ve just renewed our partnership with Channel 4. And for the first time, we’re going to be doing a lot with the Paralympics, so this is an expansion of that partnership, specifically. And what I’m really excited to see is how we can use more of our AR and innovative tools to bring that content to life on the platform.

I will be probably stealing an example or copying what we did with Wimbledon last year for these sporting moments. Wimbledon were great. They were constantly updating their stories behind the scenes from Centre Court, capturing that interaction between various athletes and tennis players from the court side, but they extended their coverage to have an official Wimbledon T-shirt that you could customise your Bitmoji.

And then for those of you that don’t know what a Bitmoji is, it is the way that you can demonstrate yourself within the app, so we all have a Bitmoji. You can actually customise it with Wimbledon T-shirts and then, if you wanted to, you could actually click through and buy it. And this was yet another hook for Wimbledon to build their brand. So, I’d love to see this happen more in in 2024 with some of the other partners that I work with.

We talked a bit about the UK election earlier and that’s another moment I’m excited to work with some of the journalists, as I said, but also make sure that we have a good amount of coverage on the platform as well.

So, lots to come. You will start to see a lot more growth within our creator ecosystem because, last year, we made it a lot easier for creators to monetise on the platform. So with that, we’re getting a lot more interest. There are those creators that have used Snapchat forever, so they’re really familiar with the product. They’re just using all our creator tools. I mean, you only have to open it up right now and you’ll see lots of Bafta coverage because they all got tickets. I work in media and I didn’t get tickets, but they all get tickets — they go with their friends and family. I mean, you spoke about the Grammys — that’s great: job done.

But what’s really exciting is that we are helping them earn money through that content and helping them bridge the gap between themselves and brands. So, watch this space with these tools in mind — you will see a lot more creator content on the platform as well.

The Media Leader: Interesting. OK, leaning in to more of the creative economy than perhaps you had been.

Luke: Yes.