Winner: Nat Geo WILD—Big Cat Week Vanishing Cats
Nat Geo WILD wanted to tell a powerful story. The objective was two-fold: To raise awareness about declining populations of big cats and to drive tune-ins to Big Car Week, the channel’s week-long special highlighting the declining population of the world’s big cats.
The team looked to create a dramatic story that would convey urgency in the message around the Big Cat Initiative. The team took advantage of Snapchat’s story function and its ability to piece together different photos into a larger message. As users watched each big cat photo disappear with the tap of their finger, it added a tangible element of reality to the experience and the fact that big cats are disappearing off the earth each day. Further enhancing the narrative was the fact that Snapchat stories themselves vanish after 24 hours. Nat Geo WILD’s Snapchat stories were a stark departure from the typical messaging seen on the platform, which is usually light and fun.
For five days during Big Cat Week, the team posted a Snapchat story that consisted of differing gradients of a single image of a big cat to give the illusion that it was disappearing. With each tap through the story, the featured big cat would slowly disappear until it dissolved into a black background with a bold fact about its decline in the wild with a tune-in message for Big Cat Week. Nat Geo WILD saw heavier than usual views of these stories. Of the users that started the story, 91 percent of them viewed it in its entirety.
Honorable Mention
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