Tour Company Topdeck Launches “World’s First Snapchat Travel Show”

As Snapchat hunts for brands, a tourism company is using the ephemeral messaging app to host its latest sponsored series. Topdeck Travel has teamed up with YouTuber Jimmy Hill and UK-based agency Thinkhouse for Topdeck Snaps, which Hill hails as the “world’s first Snapchat travel show.”

On November 27th, Hill took over the Topdeck Travel Snapchat page and began posting short video clips from a European vacation. Throughout the course of Topdeck Snaps, Hill will travel to Budapest, Krakow, Prague, and Berlin, hitting significant sites along the way. He explained his journey in a video on his YouTube channel, where he has more than 81,000 subscribers.

Topdeck Snaps arrives at a time when Snapchat is looking for brands to populate a new content section called “Discover”. In order to sweeten the deal, Snapchat has launched an ad platform

that brings a new revenue stream to the platform.

Topdeck’s efforts, however, don’t seem to be closely related to that content push. Instead, the brand is simply looking to engage its 18-39 target demographic in a novel way. As Hazel McGuire, Topdeck’s marketing manager for Europe, told StreamDaily, that target makes hill the perfect brand spokesperson.  “[Hill] is very much the sort of person who comes on our trips,” said McGuire. “He’s a history graduate…so he really gets what we want to do, and he’s 25, which is the age of our average customer.”

Viewers can keep track of Hill’s adventure by following @topdeck.travel on Snapchat. As the platform’s creative community continues to grow, look for more of these series to crop up in the near future.