Snapchat inks deal with NBC for an exclusive Olympics channel on the app

Dive Brief:

Snapchat has scored a deal with Comcast’s NBC to add a dedicated channel of video highlights of the upcoming Summer Olympics in Brazil to the app, according to Bloomberg.
The Olympics will get a Discover portal channel for two weeks that will include BuzzFeed curated content as well as Snapchat live stories from content created by NBC, athletes and spectators at the games.
The partnership marks the first time NBC has shared video of Olympics coverage with anyone. With the deal, NBC aims to drive interest in the event with Snapchat’s younger demographic that it hopes will in turn create more viewers of the TV coverage.

Dive Insight:

“We have never allowed the distribution of any game highlights off NBC’s own platforms,” Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics, told Bloomberg, adding that Snapchat “really effectively reaches a very important demographic in the United States, and is very important to our efforts to assemble the large, massive audience that will show up to watch the Olympic Games.”

The dedicated Olympics Discover channel should be attractive for advertisers as a way to tap into Olympics interest on the mobile screen. Plus, the Olympics channel will be live at a time when Snapchat has been actively improving the advertisers experience on the app. In March it changed its user policy to allow for increased targeting options, and it also addressed advertisers’ measurement concerns by bringing in new executives specifically tasked with improving ad measurement on the app.

"It’s as much about what’s going on on the field as what’s going on in the Olympic village and Rio and really feeling like you’re there -- seeing it through the fans’ eyes and the athletes' eyes," Ben Schwerin, Snapchat’s director of partnerships, told Bloomberg.

For Snapchat, covering high-profile events such as the Oscars or the Olympics provides an opportunity to engage its audience and connect those users with publishers and brands on the platform. For marketers, it means a potentially lucrative chance to get in front of the 100 million users who use Snapchat and view some 10 billion videos each day.

BuzzFeed’s involvement with the NBC Olympics channel isn’t surprising given that NBCUniversal has a $200 million stake in the online publishing giant.