Turning heads instore with Three’s Snapchat retail activation

We took the essence of Three’s Puggerfly advertising campaign and created a retail activation designed to make its stores the best place to experience Snapchat on Three.

An advertising campaign was developed by W+K and The Mill in the form of a new animal sensation – Puggerfly: half pug, half butterfly. Puggerfly was not only going to be the star of the new campaign, but also the focal point of several ground-breaking experiences created in partnership with Snapchat.

Puggerfly – the world’s first Snapchat augmented reality pet – was to star in seven consecutive daily Lenses. This meant all of the UK’s 12 million Snapchat users could enjoy our growing pup – not just our own customers. Snapchat is one of the world’s largest Augmented Reality (AR) platforms with more than 250 million Snaps shared daily with AR experiences layered in.

Snapchat is a multimedia messaging service which lets users share pictures and videos that disappear after a set time. It has 187m daily active users and is favoured by teens and young adults. Part of Snapchat’s appeal is users can add ‘filters’ to their photos, which range from adding bunny-ears to transforming you into a vampire. (Really!) We brought those filters to life with physical props and let customers create the ultimate Snaps in store.

Our retail execution took a phased approach, to reinforce Three’s Snapchat partnership and provide longevity from 20^th April until end of June.

Prior to the launch, a tease phase was delivered through a digital cocoon on window AV screens. This was created to build anticipation preceding the birth of the Puggerfly. The tease was elevated further with an upweighted execution in the five ‘flagship’ stores and was the first insight the public had into the Puggerfly’s world, a beautiful English woodland peppered with spring flowers.

For the launch, we knew employee engagement was vital to success. Employees across the company were invited to share a Snapchat selfie, with a chance for it to be featured in our POS (point of sale). To ensure our retail staff were really engaged for the after hours POS changeout, we organised our first ever POS parties across all 325 of our stores. We provided retail teams with vouchers to spend on snacks and refreshments as they snapped all the fun, whilst getting our stores ready.

Launch POS included theatre based around Snapchat’s own instantly recognisable visuals, including a cloud vomiting a rainbow and window vinyls featuring selfies from some of Three’s more outgoing team members! Every store displayed a 3D Puggerfly. For our 5 ‘flagship’ executions we performed a bespoke complete internal and external window vinyl takeover, including a 3D Puggerfly (1900mm high with a wing span of 1875mm!) and hand-assembled 3D blossom.

To give customers another compelling reason to visit our stores, we created an exclusive Snapchat lens for the campaign that could only be unlocked inside a Three store. The Lens gives customers access to a special version of a Puggerfly game. Inside our stores, we created a dedicated Snapchat destination area to facilitate customers engaging with phones specifically chosen as Snapchat perfect partners.

Customers could also become our Puggerfly by popping their head through the life-size standee – just like at Brighton pier – and stores were provided with Snapchat merchandise including soft toys and stickers. For customers less familiar with Snapchat, stores also ran Discovery sessions. These free-of- charge courses allow anyone to make sure they are getting the most out of their phone and ensures they know their Bitmoji from their geo filter.

The activation led to an increase in footfall with our target demographic.

The activation firmly established Three as the best network for Snapchat users.