Snapchat and Univision Partner for an Innovative Approach to Sponsored Content
Univision is working with Snapchat to create a Live Story for the Gold Cup Final. Live Stories allows users at an event to share pictures and videos to create a story that Snapchatters and soccer fans all over the world can enjoy for 24 hours. If the content is successful, it will likely create advertising possibilities for the platform.&nbsp;
With soccer fans from around the world gathering this weekend to watch the Gold Cup Final, media company Univision has partnered with Snapchat to bring the game to social media via the app’s Live Stories feature.

Live Stories allow users who are at the same event to share Snaps, combining them to make a full story. Univision’s Gold Cup coverage will curate attendees’ Live Stories Snaps to create a cohesive narrative that Snapchatters and soccer fans all over the world can enjoy for 24 hours until it disappears, true to Snapchat form.

With half of North American smartphone users ages 13 to 34 using Snapchat daily, it’s important for Univision to take its content to where the Millennials are, according to Mark Lopez, head of Univision Digital.

“It’s important to take our content where users are,” Lopez says. “Our main goal is to take the content and make it work for the Live Story element and for this window of users. We need to, as a content company, be very aggressive in new evolving platforms, especially around the Millennial segment of our audience and be there with content that interests this audience in any platform that has scale. Snapchat is definitely one of those.”

Univision and Snapchat first experimented with Live Stories during April’s USA versus Mexico soccer friendly. The Live Story curated for that event drew over 7 million views. This time around, Univision and Snapchat are hoping to market the Live Stories to the same advertisers who sponsor the sporting events on television and other forms of digital media.

“Advertisers are going to be very interested in participating,” Lopez says. “This is a great audience and hits our target demographic for Univision, the Millennial bi-lingual market, and this is going to be really incremental to what these advertisers are doing across our properties, so it’s going to be win/win.”

The Univision partnership is just the latest in a string of high-profile partners for Snapchat as the company attempts to monetize. At the recent Cannes Lions, Snapchat launched its new digital media agency, Truffle Pig, in conjunction with The Daily Mail, and earlier this year the social media platform rolled out Discover, ad-supported channels from publishers like BuzzFeed, CNN, and ESPN.

And as more and more advertisers flock to Snapchat, Univision hopes to keep collaborating with the social media rising star for future content creation.

“I know people are talking a lot about Discover, which is another great product,” Lopez says. “So we’re looking at that as well. [Snapchat and Univision] are also going to collaborate on new products that we’re going to take to market soon. Snapchat is a fairly new distribution platform and we want to partner closely with them as they develop new products.”

Snapchat and Univision have already annouced plans to curate content for the Copa America Centenario next summer.