Alfred E. Neuman and his gap-toothed, goofy grin are about to get uploaded to Snapchat.
Mad magazine, the 66-year-old humor brand, will bring a daily dose of original content and material curated from its archives to Snap’s mobile app. The content will launch seven days per week starting Sept. 1 and will include GIFs, memes, slide shows, and interactive lists.
Mad magazine is coming to the social and media platform under a pact between Snap, Snapchat’s parent, and DC Entertainment, which owns Mad and its intellectual property. The project is being overseen by John Ficarra, the former Mad senior VP and executive editor who serves as a creative adviser to DC Entertainment, and Peter Girardi, EVP of Blue Ribbon Content, the digital content studio of the Warner Bros. Television Group.
The companies are pitching Mad’s Snapchat content as a reinvention of the magazine’s cheeky and sarcastic brand of humor for today’s Gen Z and millennial audiences.
“We’ll be taking on sports, celebrities, politics, pop culture and anything else in the zeitgeist,” Ficarra said in a statement. “Nothing is off the table because nothing has ever been off the table with Mad.” The deal with Snap “enables us to deploy timely and topical content in real-time and in tandem with breaking news cycles,” Girardi added.
Mad’s content on Snapchat will be in the form of a Publisher Story on the platform. Ads can run in the story, consistent with Snap’s advertising model for such partnerships. The Snap/Mad magazine partnership falls under a global partnership between Time Warner (now AT&T’s WarnerMedia division) and Snap last year.
Ficarra and Girardi are longtime creative partners, most notably having teamed on the “Mad” animated series for Cartoon Network from 2010-13. Meanwhile, Girardi studied in college under Harvey Kurtzman, Mad magazine’s first editor-in-chief.
“We can’t wait to see the classic work of iconic artists like Al Jaffee and Sergio Aragones and beloved franchises like Spy vs Spy reimagined for Snapchat,” Sean Mills, head of original content for Snap, said in a statement.
