• by Larissa Faw , December 3, 2014

On November 17, the social media platform Snapchat, which erases user messages after viewing, introduced SnapCash, a mobile payment service. Now, Publicis Groupe's MRY is becoming the first agency to accept paid pitch requests using this new payment system. 

"When we heard about the launch of Snapcash on Snapchat, we saw the perfect opportunity to highlight MRY's ability to help clients navigate the ever evolving social landscape by becoming the first agency to leverage the feature," say MRY Senior Strategists Alex Marsh and Lianne Sheffy, the two executives behind this initiative.

Through the landing page, clients submit briefs for taglines, logos, and small-scale creative ideas. Initially, the digital creative agency is only accepting small RFPs, but executives say they may eventually use the platform for the full RFP process.

"Snapchat is a platform that is generating a lot of interest amongst marketers right now," say Marsh and Sheffy. "It's the fastest-growing social networking app over the past six months, and it has a captive millennial demographic that's highly attractive to many of MRY's clients and potential clients."

That said, they added, "Snapchat is the Wild West of social networks at the moment--simply because it's so new. Marketers are looking to agencies such as MRY to help them create ideas that feel authentic to how people actually use the platform."

Snapchat's unique platform presents both opportunities and challenges. "Snapchat is not like traditional social platforms," say Marsh and Sheffy. "On most of the social platforms we're used to dealing with, [such as] Facebook, Twitter, brands create content in the hopes that users will share it with their networks, but on Snapchat people aren't able to share in the traditional sense (in fact, their content disappears after only a few seconds). Snapchat content must be specially crafted to cater to this fleetingness."

Indeed, clients must embrace immediacy. "There's the challenge that Snapchat video content must be conservative in both time and production; marketers can't work with the luxuries of control to which they've become accustomed," the execs said. At the same time, "Unlike the other platforms, though, there's a great opportunity for brands that are willing to be more quirky and experimental — in part because of those very differences in the product."

To kick-off this initiative, on December 2, the agency responded to all concept submissions for $20 as part of Giving Tuesday, with all proceeds generated in this manner being donated to the Pencils of Promise charity.