• by Karl Greenberg , December 17, 2015

With fine weather and perfect waves in Hawaii, longboards went in the water Wednesday for the World Surf League's (WSL) "Billabong Pipe Masters" tourney. Jeep, thanks to a first-ever global partnership with WSL, also got its tires wet. The automaker ran another first: a global automotive ad buy on Snapchat's Live Stories.

The 24-hour campaign, running from Wednesday night through Thursday, intersperses 10-second video ads for Jeep's Wrangler within curated user content about the event. The Live Stories platform allows Snapchat users at a given event or location to contribute video and photo Snaps to a digital bullhorn -- in this case, "WSL Pipeline Masters Live Story." Snapchat edits and curates submissions and packages them into 3- to-5-minute video that can be broadcast globally to mobile devices.  

The Jeep ads tout the brand's involvement with the league, and spotlights the Wrangler as the perfect vehicle to get surfers to the water. Jeep's ads also feature Australian surfer Adam Melling, who in one of the three 10-second videos paddles out of the surf, leaps into a blue Wrangler and drives off down the beach. 

Victoria Carlini, Jeep marketing lead for media and social media, tells Marketing Daily that Jeep's relationship with WSL made the Snapchat buy an easy decision.

"When we took a look at sponsorship of World Surf League, we saw that they have a large and very active fanbase on Snapchat; and over 75% of users on Snapchat are over 17, and they have over 100 million people worldwide active daily," Carlini says.

She says that typically Jeep uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine for social activity, and some Periscope. For World Surfing, Snapchat was a no-brainer. "For us to integrate with WSL's fanbase, seamlessly? Snapchat lets us do that, and it gives us automatic credibility with the surfing community." 

A Snapchat spokesperson tells Marketing Daily that Live Stories, which the company launched last year, involves an editorial team, and — ideally but not necessarily—a partnership with the event organizers. In the case of WSL, a partnership allows Snapchat to use the league logo and other intellectual property.

She explains that for Live Story events it throws up a geofence so when there's a Snapchat user in that area they are given an option to share to the Live Story. "Our team of curators see all those snaps and curate and repackage them into three to five minute Live Stories," she says. "And it's not so much 'live' stream as curated, with a slight delay."