Advertising has always been an early adopter of tech and social platforms

All ad agencies know that having a well-designed website is not enough in today’s world. That’s why most of them have created company accounts on social media platforms and are employing dedicated social media managers to handle them.

Ad agencies have already invested social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Linkedin, where they are sharing agencies news, linking to their latest campaigns and posting their job offers. Some even use their accounts as a differentiated tool to attract both clients and future employees by offering a sneak peek inside their (always cool) agency life.

Some ad agencies have even managed to attract quite a big audience with hundreds of thousands of followers and now use their accounts, as a digital influencer would do, to orchestrate the launch of campaigns for the brands that they work for.

Why ad agencies are so keen to jump on new social platforms

Basically, ad agency staffers are always eager to try new digital things to see early on how to use them and if they can be worthwhile for their clients once they gain traction.

Early Snapchat accounts help ad agencies apprehend the platform and also serve as a testing ground for ideas that will eventually be sold to clients.

Remember the early days of Vine where agencies would experiment with short-motion videos thinking that it would become the preferred use case for the platform. It turned out that the 6-second video app finally took off thanks to short-form comedy, memes and sport replay videos.

How do ad agencies use Snapchat

Snapchat has been around since 2011 and once it shook off its early image as a sexting app for teens and became the preferred messaging for the young generation, it became a social media platform impossible not to consider.

Some early users of the platform have found incredible success on the platform (such as Jérome Jarre or Shaun McBride, aka Shonduras). It wasn’t long before celebrities jumped on the platform and adopted it massively (just like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram before).

And like the other leading social platforms, Snapchat has its own particularities that one must understand in order to succeed on it.

That’s why the ad agencies accounts on the platform are heavily relying on the best practices set up by Snapchat celebrities and media accounts:

account takeovers by agencies staff

by agencies staff playfulness attitude through filters

use of geofilters

risk-free mentality encouraged by ephemeral life span of messages

of messages interaction with viewers via private messages

use of vertical videos (vs horizontal videos)

(vs horizontal videos) use of front-facing camera pointing at the user (vs what the user is looking at)

Which ad agencies are already on Snapchat

For now, only some ad agencies (especially those that specialized in social media campaigns for their clients) have a regular presence on Snapchat and publish new stories almost daily.

The main ad agencies that you can find on Snapchat:

VaynerMedia (vaynermedia)

(vaynermedia) MRY (mryagency)

(mryagency) Mullen Lowe Group (mullenlowegroup)

(mullenlowegroup) Huge (hugesnaps)

(hugesnaps) McKinney (mckinneysnaps)

(mckinneysnaps) RPA (rpa.advertising)

(rpa.advertising) Marcel Worldwide (marcelagency)

(marcelagency) Ogilvy & Mather (ogilvy)

(ogilvy) DigitasLBi (digitaslbi)

(digitaslbi) FF Group (fredfaridgroup)

(fredfaridgroup) Brokaw (brokawinc)

(brokawinc) Sid Lee (sidlee)

Something tells us that all the major ad agencies that are already active on Twitter and Instagram will eventually follow suit and also adopt Snapchat.