Real Friends

Despite launching nearly 8 years ago and hosting 200 million users today, Snap had never released a global consumer campaign. SpecialGuest helped Snap take control of their brand narrative for the first time, introduce Snap to a new audience, and set it apart from its fiercest competitors.

We teamed up with Snap’s in-house creative team during the ideation process and presented to Snap leadership Evan Spiegel (Snap Founder) in nearly 20 brand workshops. To build our narrative, we sourced thousands of real stories from actual Snap users. We found people from around the world (while navigating compliance), assembled ethnographies, did open calls in far-flung, hard-to-reach markets, and developed a brand story that truly reflects what Snap users love most about the app.

Showcasing real pairs of “best friends,” SpecialGuest developed Real Friends to show that Snap was built for genuine connections and continues to be the social media platform where users can truly be themselves. From double chins to awkward dance moves, the campaign shows it’s the little intimate moments shared between friends that help relationships thrive.

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At the beginning of 2020, we continued the Real Friends collaboration by bringing the campaign to the stage of the Snapchat Partner Summit (SPS). Not long after that, we were asked to create Snap’s first ever B2B campaign. Thanks to the creative leadership of Rinee Shah, writing from David Ebert, and directing from Tucker Bliss, the Real Friends campaign lived on in 2020.