While many companies like the NFL, Burberry, Goldman Sachs and W Hotel have been using Snapchat for brand building and recruiting efforts, agencies have been slow to "snap" to it to promote their own services. In October of 2015, however, Giant Spoon set out to be one of the first agencies to trailblaze the burgeoning platform.
The agency was tossing around ideas of how it could better share presentations, intelligence practices, and cut-through-the-clutter ideas with clients, prospectives, and future recruits and thought Snapchat to be a great tool for fostering creativity in current Giant Spoon employees while promoting a culture of making everyone who views the quick snapshots a little bit smarter. Giant Spoon's channel, @giant_spoon, fills a void in the marketplace, shows off the agency's cultural prowess, and provides a "look under the hood" and consultative information in a fun and innovative way through a unique lens.
In keeping with its repertoire of sharing forward-thinking ideas with clients, prospects, and industry influentials, Giant Spoon utilizes the native platform of Snapchat to display the agency's deep understanding of culture through its intelligence. As Snapchat is proving to be much more than just an app for the "youths" or Millennials, the agency wanted its channel to be useful – not just an agency tour or a way to show off accolades – and to showcase the varying personalities at the agency on things they're excited about and that get their wheels turning, all while being creative on the fly.
The content shared with viewers comes across as 'playfully informative' and has displayed some educational and entertaining videos that include from super-short snaps of an employee recommending their favorite new podcast to longer-form stories encompassing emerging trends in the marketplace. Some examples include: how to take the ultimate Fish Gape photo, new ways for brands to tap into Facebook's Emoji effort, and a glimpse into UpVoted.com and why it's better than Reddit.
Feature stories in the Snapchat repertoire are comprised of 'Spoons on the Ground', where they snap from events like CES and Comic Con that marketers would be interested in, 'Spoon Recommends', recommendations of things it finds interesting or useful, like a new app or book, 'Spoon Facts', which are quick facts or tidbits for marketers (think Snapple Facts but for CMOs), and 'Spoon Snap Intelligence' – 3-5 minute presentations of cultural intelligence, edited specifically for Snapchat. For Intelligence presentations, which have touched on everything from the history of GIFs in popular culture to a more playful water blind taste test as commentary on the power of brands, Giant Spoon employees go as far as to storyboard each slide, just as they would for proper Keynote decks. They try to film them in a way that does not look like the are capturing a plain old slide – rather, inserting emoji stamps, using the illustrator tool, breaking up the segments with fun title cards – in order to keep the raw, in-the-moment feeling that has made the platform such a success alive.
Please have a look at many of Giant Spoon's Snapchat stories here.
Giant Spoon has witnessed an immense spike in its followers from only beginning to 'snap' not even six months ago. Upon launching its channel, the agency received major praise in the press with a feature article in Digiday announcing its debut, and later, with a writeup in the same outlet as one of the top agency accounts to follow, along with one in Adweek. While it may be difficult to gauge the successes of a burgeoning platform such as Snapchat from a quantitative standpoint, one of Giant Spoon's more recent stories received upwards of 250 views – a large feat for a small shop. The agency is consistently mindful of promoting its culture and insights to prospective clients and recruits and has plans to continually pump out uber creative activity to keep its followers – and those who will be following – engaged and educated.
