
Some of the best experiments I’ve worked on in digital news are the ones done in the moment, unplanned. That’s very much how we came up with the idea to live-Snapchat the Super Bowl’s ads last night.
Like many news sites, we’d posted all the night’s ads ahead of the game (the ones that were not embargoed, at least), and those had done well for us traffic-wise. And we had a good plan in place to cover both the game and the ads with our liveblog and other tools. We are all set! Then we noticed that Facebook was asking for celebs to “live-Facebook” their game experiences and that the hashtags were already humming on Twitter. So the Snapchat idea popped up.
We’d launched a presence on Snapchat a few weeks ago for our politics coverage (you can follow it by adding “postpolitics” from your account). But we hadn’t really done anything live. Here’s some of what we learned:


Going forward, we think we’ll use this more for IRL events. Experimenting live — just doing it — is the best way to learn. You can see our snaps from last night by adding ‘coryinbeta’ from your Snapchat account.
Cory Haik is executive producer and senior editor for digital news at The Washington Post.
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