Dive Brief:

• Candy brand Jolly Rancher, which is owned by The Hershey Company, has built a social media campaign timed for when many college students are taking their final exams, a recent review of Twitter and Snapchat by Mobile Marketer revealed. The effort uses a variety of tweets, short animation and humor to engage students on Snapchat Discover and Twitter Moments. 
• The Snapchat Discover story is called Finals Week: Nothing Feels Real, Everything Counts and features Jolly Rancher as the only advertiser. In it, short videos overlaid with themed filters feature students at different schools and are interspersed with short animations of fruit representing the brand’s popular flavors as they study and comment on the stress. 
• The effort is built around the hashtags #finalssuck and #keeponsucking, reflecting the hard candy’s attempt to be authentic and witty while also promoting its product. 

Dive Insight:

With its straightforward but compelling message — exams are stressful and students need to let off steam, the Jolly Rancher campaign is a good example of how brands can leverage curated and sponsored content on social media. The content is also relevant and entertaining, with the Snapchat Discover story featuring students at different colleges around the country like Wesleyan and UC Berkeley as they deal with finals stress. In this sense, it is similar to a recent Wal-Mart campaign on Snapchat Discover themed around Easter  that also used short animated content. Students' coping tactics highlighted in the Snapchat Discover story include covering your face with googly eyes as well as sitting on the floor and biting into an entire large pizza pie. 

By creating a Twitter Moments collection, Jolly Rancher is able to collect the best tweets and content in one place to make a bigger impact. 

Another best practice on display in the Jolly Rancher campaign is the use of a variety of content types — tweets, videos, animation — enabling the brand to keep the campaign fresh for users who encounter it across platforms or on different visits to the same platform. The visuals are also simple, using bold colors and graphics to grab attention and create an emotional connection. Just as importantly, they are short, which is key for engaging busy millennials.

While both Twitter and Snapchat have lost some of their luster as user growth slows, the Jolly Rancher campaign also underscores how these platforms remain an important way to reach young consumers. In fact, recent research shows Gen Z prefers Snapchat to its social rivals.