Dive Brief:

• Bacardi and Swizz Beatz teamed up for an Instagram Stories campaign that puts viewers behind the decks of a virtual DJ set up, according to reporting by Adweek.
• The campaign is a content marketing effort rather than a paid ad and will appear on the spirit company’s followers home pages for 24 hours, be published to Bacardi’s Instagram feed and eventually be pushed to all of Bacardi’s social media outreach.
• The campaign was created with the help of BBDO New York and Facebook’s Creative Shop, with Tonefarmer providing the music. 

Dive Insight:

Instagram Stories are one of Facebook’s Snapchat knock-offs with a few twists. Stories launched in early August with the same name and basic functionality of the Snapchat feature of the same name, although Facebook included tapping into its enormous user database for the Instagram feature’s algorithm and it also added personalized suggestions via that data, a function that Snapchat Stories doesn’t offer.

While marketers have been embracing Snapchat, discoverability and metrics are still a challenge. The Bacardi effort points to how Instagram is a strong choice for marketers looking to leverage influencer marketing because of its visual strengths and new e-commerce features enabling sponsored posts to link directly back to retailers' websites. 

The Bacardi effort taps into the brand's background of supporting music-related promotions and campaigns, as Adweek reported. And Instagram is a good choice for a music-related content marketing effort as Nielsen research has found that the platform’s users spend 30% more time listening to music weekly and 2x more on music tickets and merchandise compared to the average population.