Real Friends

In 2018, despite having launched nearly eight years before and hosting 200 million users, Snap Inc. had never released a global consumer campaign. The company’s core message had gotten away from its own control, and needed to develop a global story. SpecialGuest helped Snap Inc. take control of their brand narrative for Snapchat, introducing Snapchat to a new audience and setting it apart from its fiercest competitors.

We teamed with Snap Inc.’s in-house creative team during the ideation process and presented to Snap leadership, including co-founder Evan Spiegel, in nearly 20 brand workshops. To build our narrative, we sourced thousands of real stories from Snapchat 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 Snapchat users love most about the app.

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Our work with Snap represents a core philosophy of our team: After we develop a concept, we don’t drop it; we help it evolve and do more for our clients. In 2020, SpecialGuest revived and evolved Real Friends, thanks to the creative leadership of Rinee Shah, writing from David Ebert, and directing from Tucker Bliss.

Showcasing real pairs of “best friends,” SpecialGuest developed Real Friends to show that Snapchat was built for genuine connections and continues to be the social media platform where users can truly be themselves. The campaign shows it’s the little intimate moments shared between friends—from double chins to awkward dance moves and general silliness—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. Not long after that, we were asked to create Snap’s first B2B campaign. As of 2024, Snapchat has 800 million monthly active users.