We wanted to tell a powerful story. Our objective was two-fold: to raise awareness about declining populations of big cats and to drive tune-in to Big Cat Week, our annual week-long event on Nat Geo Wild.
By taking advantage of Snapchat's Story function, we created a dramatic story that would convey urgency in the message around the Big Cat Initiative.
For five days during Big Cat Week, we created a story a day in which users received a beautiful image of a majestic big cat . As the user tapped through the story, the Big Cat image began to disappear - this added a tangible element of reality to the experience and the fact that big cats are disappearing off the earth each day.
At the end of the story, the screen faded to a stark black background, with a bold statistic on its remaining population. Further enhancing our narrative was the fact that Snapchat Story itself vanished after 24 hours.
We focused on five different big cats in decline with strong imagery, ending with the following statistics.
Day 1: Tigers
Tigers have declined 50% since 1990.
Day 2: Snow Leopards
Only 4,000 snow leopards are left in the wild.
Day 3: Lions
Only 30,000 lions are left in the wild.
Day 4: Jaguars
Jaguars have lost 46% of their habitat.
Day 5: Cheetahs
Only 10,000 cheetahs are left in the wild.
This approach to Snapchat during Big Cat Week is a departure from the traditional light-hearted messaging seen on Snapchat and helped raise awareness around endangered cats. Despite having no budget behind this execution, we saw heavier than usual views of these stories. Of the users that started the story, 91% of them viewed it in its entirety. In addition to our posts on Snapchat, we increased our visibility by promoting the campaign on Twitter to our 286K followers. We also received wide positive feedback via Twitter and Snapchat.
