Snapchat Spotlight: seeding 20,000+ videos and 180M+ views across South India
Snapchat partnered with Zapplr to fuel its Spotlight short-video platform in South India — a content-seeding program that activated regional creators to publish 20,000+ Spotlight videos, cumulatively generating 180M+ views in the languages real India actually scrolls in.
What we were up against
India is one of the fastest-growing creator markets for Snapchat, and Spotlight — its short-form, vertical-video feed — lives or dies on a steady supply of fresh, native content. To compete for attention in South India, Snapchat needed more than a one-off influencer burst. It needed sustained content supply at scale: thousands of genuinely local Spotlight videos from Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada creators, published consistently over months — in the languages and cultural codes that real India actually scrolls in.
How we attacked the problem
- 1
Built a South-India-wide creator engine across Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada — chosen for native regional reach rather than metro, English-first audiences
- 2
Treated the brief as always-on content supply rather than a single campaign — onboarding and activating creators in waves so Spotlight saw a steady, compounding flow of new videos
- 3
Engineered every video for the Spotlight format and its discovery algorithm — vertical, hook-first, trend-aware content built to earn watch time and travel far beyond a single follower base
- 4
Localised everything to real-India culture — regional language, local humour, and trends — so each video felt native to its audience instead of translated marketing
How it played out
- 01
Creator onboarding at scale: recruited and activated a broad base of regional creators across the four South Indian language markets and mapped them to high-performing Spotlight formats
- 02
Always-on seeding: creators published Spotlight videos continuously across the 3-month window, keeping a constant supply of native content flowing into the feed
- 03
Format optimisation: doubled down on the hooks, styles, and trends earning the most Spotlight watch time, then briefed the wider creator base to ride them
- 04
Volume with authenticity: scaled past 20,000 published videos without letting the content feel mass-produced — every video rooted in a genuine local voice
What actually happened
The program seeded 20,000+ Spotlight videos and generated 180M+ cumulative views in just three months — an average of roughly 9,000 views per video across a deep long tail of regional creators. By treating Spotlight as a content-supply challenge rather than a one-off campaign, Zapplr gave Snapchat a sustained engine of native, regional-language video to help power the growth of Spotlight in one of its fastest-growing markets.
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