Snapchat adds hockey highlights, curated stories to NHL deal

Brief:

Snapchat expanded a multiyear deal with the National Hockey League to add content and several features for fans. The league is working with Disney Streaming Services (DSS) to create "NHL Highlights," a weekly show for the image-sharing app, and Curated Our Stories for some games and big events, per Variety. DSS shares ads revenue with Snapchat parent Snap for the NHL content.
The revised partnership again includes Bitmoji outfits for all 31 NHL teams. Fans can dress up the their cartoon avatars in Snapchat with their favorite team's colors. They also can decorate their posts with digital Geofilter stickers for every team's home arena, per Sport Techie.
Heidi Browning, CMO of the NHL, said Snapcha'’s audience is appealing for the league because it skews younger. Hockey fans share millions of NHL images on Snapchat every day, she told Variety.

Insight:

The NHL's expanded partnership with Snapchat, which has 186 million users worldwide, helps the league to cultivate a younger fan base that's more difficult to reach through TV. Millions of consumers have canceled pay-TV subscriptions in favor of streaming services to narrow their programming choices. Disney Streaming Services operates the NHL app and NHL.TV subscription-streaming package for out-of-market games in partnership with the league.

For marketers like the NHL that are looking to reach younger consumers, Snapchat can be an appealing option. Snapchat can reach 70% of U.S. consumers ages 13 to 34 with premium mobile video ads on a monthly basis, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said during the company's quarterly earnings call earlier this month. Eighty-four percent of U.S. teens report using Snapchat once a month, according to Piper Jaffray's "Taking Stock With Teens" survey.

The bigger menu of NHL content likely will help Snapchat boost its engagement with sports fans as the company competes with bigger rivals like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Snapchat parent Snap reduced its quarterly loss as revenue surged 36% from a year earlier to $389.8 million on strong gains in digital advertising. Ad impressions surged 179% from a year earlier, but pricing declined 48% as the company shifted to programmatic ad insertions. Snap is forecast to command about 0.7% of U.S. digital ad market this year, behind Google’s 31.3%, Facebook’s 20.5% and Amazon’s 2.8%, according to research firm eMarketer.