Snooze alert: HuffPost joins Snapchat Discover for 24 hours to promote sleep

The Huffington Post, which proudly brags about its headquarters’ envious nap rooms, is pushing its pro-sleep agenda to Snapchat.

Today, the publisher launched a pop-up channel on Snapchat Discover called Recharge, described in a release as a “guide to helping you sleep well, feel great and perform better.” The channel is live for 24 hours, expiring tomorrow afternoon.

Recharge is a colorful content mix consisting of advice like what the “best miracle beauty product is” (spoiler: it’s sleep), energy boosting hacks, sex tips, stretching guides, the science behind sleeping and a video of Vine star Jerome Jarre closing his eyes in backseat of a car.

HuffPost is the first real publisher to get a Discover pop-up channel. Publisher and commerce platform Brit + Co has a channel focusing on crafts over the holidays and brands, like Burberry and Sony have purchased these channels.

In a memo, founder Arianna Huffington said the addition of a Discover channel is an “exciting step forward in our goal of meaningfully engaging with our growing global audience,” adding that since teens and college students are the largest amount of Snapchat users, “it’s important for [HuffPost] to reach them” there.

sleep huff po
A screenshot of Recharge.

Huffington told Digiday that it was Joanna Coles, Cosmopolitan’s editor-in-chief and who’s also on Snapchat’s board, who had the idea for HuffPost to start the channel. She said the app’s young audience was the “generation we need to reach and to educate them about sleep before they enter exams.”

She admitted that she hadn’t much time to interact with the channel since it just launched, but said she was “incredibly pleased” with it so far. “To take the science of sleep and make it super accessible to people and make it something they would want to share with friends,” Huffington said of the channel’s purpose.

Notably, Huffington is in a whirlwind of a press and college tour for new book “The Sleep Revolution,” which is about sleep. Neither Recharge, nor her memo, mentions the book.

Banner image via Shutterstock.

https://digiday.com/?p=172314

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