Idea: Create a weekly Snapchat Discover show that could become a global home for Saturday morning pre-game hype, with a target audience of football fans 25 and under. It must have the most obnoxious name possible.
Role: Creative lead - writer, art director, director and presenter. I also created an original soundtrack for some episodes.
Deliverables: 40 episodes, delivered weekly for the duration of the football season.
Result: More than 50m views across the series, with millions of shares and engagements. 500,000 screenshots on one of our best performing tiles. Nominated by Digiday for "Best Use of Snapchat".
What do a young football audience want on a Saturday morning? Despite its initial impact, the numbers suggest it's no longer the likes of Soccer AM. That audience has flocked to the likes of Snapchat, and that is where we met them.
Saturdays Are Lit ran for 40 weeks, with a ~90-second episode delivered every Saturday morning on Snapchat Discover.
From the off our intention was purely editorial - brand-building and disruptive. We created something delightfully silly and reliably anarchic, serving as an appetiser for the weekend of football ahead. We satirised Discover for the clickbait-hell it had become, as well as the laughably over-the-top world of football media.
I lead a team writing, directing and sometimes editing the content in a 24-hour period before release every week.
Success on the project is subjective, but some stand-out moments were hitting half a million screenshots on one 10 second snap, 60,000 shares on another, and when the series concluded we were inundated with tweets imploring us to bring it back the following season. We also put our personal phone numbers in the show once for a laugh, which led to us having to turn our phones off for two days. Lesson learned.
The show was covered by The Guardian, Digiday and The Drum, and was nominated for a Digiday award for Best Use of Snapchat in 2017. Off the back of the series, I spoke to businesses like Warner Music, the BBC, and TV2 Denmark about how to create original content for a young audience.