Prediction Master: Our latest collaboration with Snapchat

When I founded Mammoth Media in 2015, my mission was to entertain mobile audiences by finding that perfect sweet spot between compelling content and the highly-engaging experience that games typically provide.

Our execution to date has been through one entry point: our owned & operated apps, but we’ve also seen a ton of success in syndicating our IP through Snapchat Discover — specifically Wishbone’s signature style of social polling and trend-based content.

In under two years, Wishbone’s Publisher Story has grown to serve 12 million unique monthly viewers, thanks in part to Snapchat’s deeply engaged and massive audience (Snapchat reaches 90% of Generation Z in the U.S.). But more importantly, we’ve also gained a clear understanding of the types of content and delivery systems that perform best within the platform.

Given our shared beliefs in the intersection of gaming and content, Snap recently approached us to build a product for today’s launch of Snap Minis, a new in-app messaging experience created to help Snapchatters engage with their friends in fun and creative ways.

Mammoth Media is stoked to bring Prediction Master to Snapchat very soon, so let’s get into how we collectively brought this product to life.

When it comes to messaging, Generation Z’s platforms of choice are iMessage and Snapchat, period. The average Snapchatter sends 34.1 messages a day, and there’s a critical opportunity to gamify the conversations they’re already having with their friends and family in the app.

My team’s overall strategy was defined by the things we’ve learned from our own products. Through Wishbone, for example, we understood people’s desire to share their opinions (through Wishbone’s side-by-side comparisons) to see how their ideas compared with their peers. We didn’t intend for it to be a competitive experience, but were pleasantly surprised to see how our users gamified it in that way over the years, and cared about getting their votes “right” versus simply choosing a side.

We also leveraged the behaviors already taking place within text and chat around sharing news and trends while, maybe unintentionally, forecasting what follows next.

Prediction Master does just that — it’s an interactive messaging experience that allows Snapchatters to test each others’ knowledge of what may happen in the future, with timely questions on everything from pop culture to politics, movies to music, the stock market to sneaker drops, and much more.

After selecting the categories they’re most interested in, Snapchatters receive a set of cards based on those topics, receive points for correct predictions (and how quickly they cast it before the card expires), see how their peers voted as well as a global tally of predictions, and get to earn achievements for accuracy in specific categories.

While we designed the experience for Gen Z, we’re confident Prediction Master will appeal to a broader subset of users. We phrase questions in a way that ensures users don’t feel like they have to be an expert to cast a prediction — all you need is a general base knowledge of the topic.

Snap was extremely collaborative throughout the entire process, and gave us the ability to build a product that leveraged Snapchat’s proven expertise in virality and shareability.

We’re honored to continue working with Snap and to be pioneering Snap Minis with them today. I’ve always been a #LongLA guy so building something new with our local tech community makes me extremely proud.

As always, we want users to shape how we deliver new content, so we’re going to keep a close eye on how Snapchatters respond to the product and tune it along the way for maximum engagement.

This is a large scale execution of gaming-meets-content and there’s a lot to learn now that the product is live. Stay tuned for more updates as we go along on this journey.

Benoit Vatere is the Founder & CEO of Mammoth Media, the social entertainment studio that builds, publishes, and monetizes original short-form content for Generation Z. It owns & operates the apps Yarn, Wishbone, and CatchUp.