Dive Brief:
- Billboard and Snap Inc. announced a partnership to bring original music content and programming to the Snapchat Discover portal, with the first offering of a multi-episode "docu-series" called "Artist Pass" debuting on Sunday, according to a press release made available to Marketing Dive.
- Each episode is four to five minutes in length and takes viewers backstage with featured artists before performances at music festivals. The episodes will air bi-weekly and will be available on the Discover portal for 48 hours.
- The first episode featured country artist Luke Bryan, who took viewers backstage at Michigan's Faster Horses country music festival. Demi Lovato and hip-hop brothers Rae Sremmurd are on deck for future episodes.
Dive Insight:
The purpose of the partnership is to engage Snapchat's mainly millennial audience — the app reaches 9x more 18-34 year-olds in the U.S. than the average top 15 TV networks on any given day — and help Billboard remain "progressive and ambitious" in its content creation, per the press release. Snapchat has become valued by marketers and media companies for its ability to offer behind-the-scenes access to major events, with tools like Spectacles augmenting the VIP experience. In January, L’Oréal Paris equipped its brand ambassadors with Spectacles to give fans and followers a peek at the Golden Globes, for example.
The Snapchat Discover portal began as a prestige channel very selectively doled out to publishers with multimedia content capabilities. It's slowly expanded to include more publishers and, around a year ago, Snap started to add more TV-like content to the page through deals with media companies like NBCUniversal for truncated versions of shows like "The Voice" and E! News' "The Rundown." Although Billboard is more in line with Discover's original lineup of magazine and newspaper publishers, Artist Pass falls into the TV-like mode with its documentary-style episodes.
Even though Snapchat continues to announce new content deals, Snap has undergone a rough stretch since its initial public stock offering in March. Last week, its stock fell to its lowest level since the company went public after it was blocked from the S&P 500 index. Snap is expected to release Q2 earnings Aug. 10 after market close.
The announcement is the second recent partnership from Billboard. In late July, it announced a deal with Ford Motor Company for a free concert series in select cities to provide an online hub of interviews, behind-the-scenes content and playlists from the featured artists.
