Brief:
- The city of Paris’s Snapchat campaign during Fashion Week spurred 5.7 million views as mobile users shared 200,000 chats and stories on the image-messaging app, according to a press release shared with Mobile Marketer. The campaign aimed to promote the French capital as a digital "smart" city during the showcase for fashion designers from Feb. 27 to March 6.
- Digital agency IRM created the campaign for the city in an effort to reach Snapchat's demographic of tech-savvy millennials. The promotion aligned with French President Emmanuel Macron's effort to transform France into a "startup nation" by encouraging entrepreneurship with special tax incentives for investment.
- The campaign trialed Snapchat filters designed for a different state of mind or demographic, such as ‘Be on the cover of a magazine,’ ‘Postcards from the city of fashion’ and fashionista sunglasses. IRM geotargeted the exact spot where people take selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower with a geofilter that could only be found in that precise location.
Insight:
The results show how encouraging consumers interested in visually-driven activities like fashion and visiting Paris can be encouraged to take photos with their smartphones and share them on social media. The city of Paris’s campaign on Snapchat spurred an impressive number of mobile interactions during Fashion Week, which is hosted during a period of fewer tourist visits. The high season for tourism typically runs from May to August, while November through February is the low point. Snapchat users aged 18-24 spend on average 909 minutes on the platform, significantly higher than Facebook at 640 minutes a month and they account for more than two thirds (74%) of Snapchat’s total minutes, according to comScore data cited by IRM.
Like many European cities that are chronically insecure about appearing old, stodgy and overburdened by history, Paris wants to remake its image as a center of technical innovation. Meanwhile, the city is well suited for an image-sharing app like Snapchat, with its almost endless variety of cinematic architecture, monuments, cathedrals, parks and museums. The city also wanted to reach a younger skewing audience among tourists and the 11 million Snapchatters in France, 70% of whom are over 18, per IRM.
IRM ran A/B split testing and adjusted the daily budget and time to day to maximize the effect of the campaign, per a statement. The campaign tested six different styles of Snapchat filters across the Paris region for the duration of Paris Fashion Week, combining audience filters and geofilters in an attempt to reach the maximum number of tourists and Parisians. Paris Tourism was also able to seed this information among other social media channels to help drive additional foot traffic to a specific location. As tourism season heats up next month, it will be interesting to see how the city parlays its experience during Fashion Week to periods of peak visitation.