Brief:

• Moët Hennessy USA is promoting its champagne brands during the holiday season with a Snapchat game targeted at people above the drinking age. The "Moët & Chandon Tower Toss" lets two people take turns swiping on a smartphone screen to shoot a champagne cork into a tower of stacked glasses, per Chief Marketer.
• Moët placed paid ads on Snapchat Discover, the messaging app’s platform for professionally produced content, to reach an audience of people over age 25, according to Digiday. In addition to Snapchat’s ad-targeting features, Moët asks players to enter their birthdates before playing the game. Ad agency Attention helped the brand develop the game, which Moet claimed is Snapchat’s first two-player game. The game was designed for Snapchat, but Instagram and Facebook users can play a web version through special links.
• Moët and Attention altered the original design of the game from an approach that gave winners a chance to unlock an exclusive geofilter and share it with friends on Snapchat. Moët removed geofiltering because of difficulties in preventing Snapchat users from sharing it with people under 21, Christine Ngo Isaac, marketing director and head of U.S. consumer engagement for Moët & Chandon, told Digiday. 

Insight:

Moët Hennessy, Moët & Chandon's parent company, is making a significant push into mobile marketing platforms this holiday season. The company rolled out an innovative Snapchat game, a crowd-sourced Instagram experience and voice-activated content for Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant, per Media Post. The Instagram campaign used the image-sharing app’s polling feature to let U.S. consumers determine the content they wanted to see from social influencers who provide advice on home entertaining. Moët Hennessy’s “Bottles and Bubbles” skill for Alexa let people learn more about champagne and the company’s brands, which in addition to Moët & Chandon include Dom Pérignon, Krug, Veuve Clicquot and Ruinart.

A key challenge for alcoholic beverage marketers is reaching a target audience while avoiding underage viewers. That’s especially true for an app like Snapchat that is the most popular social media app among U.S. teens, according to a survey by RBC Capital. Moët & Chandon’s Ngo Isaac said the company found Snapchat’s age-gating tools effective in preventing underage users from seeing its ads, but the company doesn’t have an official company account on the app. The brand added an age verification step where Snapchat users to enter their age before playing the game. Ngo Isaac said Moët has found millennials in the 30-34 age group on Snapchat.

Heineken and William Grant & Sons have voiced concerns about using Snapchat as a marketing platform because of worries about age-filtering, Digiday reported in August. Bud Light, Shock Top, Smirnoff and Jameson are among the brands that have used Snap Ads, holiday filters and lenses, according to a Snapchat blog. The company said 44% of Snapchat users in the U.S. look to friends and family for recommendations on alcohol purchases, compared with 19% of non-Snapchatters. Snapchatters are also 9% more likely to buy alcoholic beverages than the national average, based on an Oracle analysis of real purchase data from 2016. About 80% of Snapchat users are above 18, but the company declined to specify how many are over 21, per Digiday.