Champagne brand Moët & Chandon wanted its “Love Unconventional” campaign, running Valentine’s Day through Mother’s Day, to drive engagement with elements of gameplay.
While the campaign will be heavy on digital video and influencer content across Facebook and Instagram, its more immersive elements are more endemic to Snapchat’s platform, said Christine Ngo, marketing director and head of US customer engagement at Moët & Chandon.
“A lot of advertisers, especially in the luxury space, use Snapchat to amplify content,” she said. “We really wanted to engage people in this program.”
Moët worked with Snap to develop a mobile game in which users shoot corks at a Moët champagne tower. To tie into the campaign’s love theme, winners get to collaborate on a love poem generated with input from modern poet Cleo Wade.
Moët will work with Snap directly to place the buys, which will live in its Discover section.
The brand will use Snap’s targeting tools to direct the campaign at an audience that’s interested in luxury, wines and spirits. Snapchat is a good platform to find such people because its audience has a household income that’s higher than the national average, and 35% of Snapchatters can’t be found on Facebook and Instagram, Ngo said.
But because Snap’s audience skews young, Moët, as a wine and spirits maker, will have to be extra careful in how it targets the campaign.
“We’ll target people 25 and up just to be extra sure,” Ngo said. “As soon as they get to our experience they’re age-gated again, so it has to be compelling enough for people to click through and enter in their age.”
To measure success of the game, Moët will look at engagement metrics like time spent and click-through rates. That’s different to how it will measure success on Facebook and Instagram, which are more passive experiences, Ngo said.
“Making sure we’re serving content that’s custom to each platform and that we’re able to get the right engagement metrics is the most important thing for us,” she said.
While some advertisers are deterred by Snap’s high-cost and platform-specific creative requirements, Moët thought reaching the platform’s engaged audience outweighed the costs of potentially being unable to reuse the creative, Ngo said. To extend the game to people who don’t have Snapchat, Moët will buy ads on Facebook and Instagram that can direct users to a browser-based version of the game.
“We’re not striving to reuse assets, but if there is a way to do it, that’s an efficient way of repurposing our creative,” she said.
This is Moët’s second Snapchat campaign. The brand worked with Snap for the first time at the end of last year on a holiday campaign leveraging the same champagne cork-shooting game. The brand was impressed with the results: the game had a 70% completion rate, a 92% replay rate compared to the platform’s 20% average and racked up 450 hours of time spent playing over two weeks. Moët also likes that Snap is a more open ecosystem than Facebook and Instagram, Ngo said.
But Snap, which is struggling to acquire users and still just reaches a niche (albeit valuable) audience, is still an experimental buy for Moët.
“It depends on the campaign and who we’re trying to target,” Ngo said. “It’s not necessarily something we’ll use for every single program.”
This story has been updated with results from Moët’s previous Snapchat campaign.