The objective of partnering with a social influencer for The Prancing Elites Project season 1 marketing campaign was to leverage the social and cultural clout of a relevant personality among our W18-34 target to help drive awareness and interest in Oxygen's newest reality docu-series. We wanted a brand advocate who would not only promote tune-in to their large followings, but someone who could personally relate to the Prancing Elites' story and would stand behind their message, and ultimately create engaging, organic-feeling content. The Prancing Elites, as a group of black, gay and gender-non-conforming dancers from the South, have often dealt with the struggle of not being accepted, but they also have a unique flare that makes them fun and entertaining to watch. Social media influencer, Lohanthony, not only addresses his own struggles with sexuality and bullying in many of his videos, but he has a strong voice amongst our millennial target audience – and he's just as sassy as our Elites! Our goal was to leverage Lohanthony across two of his top social platforms, YouTube and Snapchat, to drive tune-in to the series premiere by creating fun, relatable content with which to engage his existing fans, and, secondarily, jumpstart the growth of Oxygen's following on Snapchat.
Knowing that millennials often look to their peers and the social space for everything from entertainment to inspiration & advice, we looked to Lohanthony as a social influencer who would be able to use his authentic voice to support the series premiere of Oxygen's The Prancing Elites Project and our cast – a group of loveable underdogs who are sassy and hilarious, yet often struggle with the relatable feeling of not always fitting in. Fullscreen (our YouTube-focused agency) and Naritiv (our Snapchat creative agency) were tasked with finding creators with large followings that fit the demographic of our show's target audience, and Lohanthony became that cross-platform influencer we were looking for. With his YouTube subscriber base at over 1.5MM, he had also grown his audience across other social platforms, including Snapchat (with averages of 50k+ Snap opens) – one of the most used platforms among our millennial target. By working with Lohanthony across multiple social platforms, we would be able to generate frequency of our messaging, a feeling that Lohanthony is invested in the Elites and has a bigger relationship with them, and create an impactful cross-screen execution to drive buzz leading up to the premiere.
Our strategy was to develop content in partnership with Lohanthony for both platforms that would natively integrate the Prancing Elites, keeping in mind creators like him know their platforms better than anyone and can engage with their audiences in a meaningful way. For YouTube, we filmed a collaboration cover music video with another YouTube star, Sam Tsui – knowing that Lohanthony's fans love his collaborations – featuring Lohanthony and the Prancing Elites. The song we chose, Desire by Years & Years, talks about relevant themes of being strong and true to yourself. Lohanthony promoted the music video on Twitter to his over 1.6MM followers in order to drive conversation and traffic to the video which was housed on his YouTube channel. We also cut shorter pre-roll video from the longer full video to run across YouTube which drove people to check out the full version.
On Snapchat, Lohanthony, along with Snapchat artist Chrisine Mi, took over the OxygenTV handle during the first three episodes of The Prancing Elites Project to live-snap the episodes. In order to generate excitement and promote tune-in, they created fun, live Snapchat stories inherently native to the platform including short captioned videos, drawings, images with doodles, and more reacting to the episodes as they were airing. Lohanthony announced the OxygenTV Snapchat takeover from his own Snapchat and Twitter accounts in order to leverage his extensive fan base, and drive people over to Oxygen's handle to check him out.
Season 1 of The Prancing Elites Project was the highest rated series premiere since the network's rebrand in October 2014. The premiere episode had the highest amount of live viewing for the season. The series resonated amongst a diverse millennial audience, with a median age of 34. A total of 27.5% of viewers were new to Oxygen, which is well above Oxygen series launch norms.
The custom YouTube video with Lohanthony generated over 400k views, 15% above our estimate, and the pre-roll driver received over 1MM impressions. The full video received 700+ comments and 17K likes, with an engagement rate of 4.5% - 200% above Fullscreen's benchmark of 2%. Lohanthony's social promotion for the video on Twitter drove over 1.9k likes and over 650 retweets.
In terms of Snapchat, prior to the launch of this campaign, the OxygenTV Snapchat account averaged 324 views per Snap and by the end of the campaign, average views had increased to 7.46K views per Snap – a 2,202% increase in views per Snap. The OxygenTV Snapchat account gained 7,500 followers, a 2,000% growth! The entire campaign garnered 8.58M total Snap views (200% over our estimate), 700k OxygenTV Snap views, 3.43K screenshots, 30.5M seconds watched, and 149 seconds of content viewed on average per user on Snapchat.