The National Football League has extended its partnership with the ephemeral social media site Snapchat for another two years. The deal will see the development of additional content and highlight shows.
As part of the new multi-year contract, the football league will produce a “best of” Snapchat story that will bring fans regularly updated highlights and breaking news every Sunday. This will be in addition to the daily (in season) and weekly (offseason) stories it already publishes on the app, which Snapchat then helps to distribute to its more than 190 million daily active users.
The new Sunday posts will be updated every hour with highlights and news that are packaged specifically for Snapchat. NFL content will be available on Snap’s “discover” page and past editions of the stories will be available through the app’s search feature.
“We’re excited to continue growing our partnership with Snapchat,” said Blake Stuchin, NFL vice president of digital media business development. “Millions of fans engage with the NFL every day on Snapchat. The Sunday Publisher Story will be another great addition to our presence on the platform.”
The NFL and Snapchat have been partnering on content since at least 2015. NFL-related stories have brought Snapchat users into an NFL stadium on gameday, from fan-captured perspectives in the stands to behind-the-scenes video produced by the league, its clubs and players. Since 2016, the NFL has been producing live stories on Snapchat for all of its 250-plus regular season games plus the playoffs.
For the 2017/18 season, roughly 52 million unique viewers globally watched NFL content on Snapchat. The platform’s dynamic scoreboard filter was viewed more than 575 million times during Super Bowl LII.
For the approaching season, the NFL and Snapchat plan to coordinate on the development of additional creative tools, such as a more robust offering of filters, lenses and bitmojis for fans and content creators to enhance their NFL-related Snapchat stories.
“The NFL has been a phenomenal partner that continues to make the most of all of Snapchat’s offerings,” said Nick Bell, Snap’s vice president of content.
SportTechie Takeaway
Leagues, teams and athletes are increasingly relying on Snapchat and Instagram to interact more intimately with fans and to create unique content from a variety of perspectives. Snapchat, meanwhile, has been positioning itself as a publisher’s platform, adding tools that help organizations better engage with users.
In June, Snap extended its partnership with ScoreStream to ramp up the use of that app’s dynamic geofilters to add live sports scores to user posts. Around the same time Snap also teamed up with SeatGeek to enable Snapchat users to purchase tickets to sporting events and concerts directly through the social platform. Earlier this month, Snap announced that it would be working with news discovery companies, including Tagboard, to build a reliable news hub that will include sports news.