Snapchat is the hottest advertising ticket right now. With 150 million daily users, they reach 41% of consumers 18-34 in the US. And, just in time for Cannes, they unveiled a new advertising strategy last week, including an API that will allow Snapchat ads to be sold by third parties.
This land rush is going to be interesting to watch, particularly since Snapchat remains perplexing to many of the marketers who will be clamoring to use it.
Taco Bell CMO Marisa Thalberg exactly describes this tension:
“I will say, with a bit of a wink and a smile, that when I started to see some of the creative ideas for this, this is where I suddenly felt a little old because I thought, I don’t know if this is on brand.”
For Cinco de Mayo, Taco Bell executed a campaign with a Snapchat lens that turned peoples’ heads into giant tacos with fire eyes and hot sauce hair. In one day, the lens achieved 224 million views and people engaged with it for 24 seconds before sharing.
That level of engagement will lure a lot of brands into the platform. And succeeding on Snapchat will require more customized creative than elsewhere.
As with any new platform, the risk is in the cart leading the horse. Many marketers will be rushing to come up with a “Snapchat strategy.” It’s important to remember that the brand strategy comes first, and Snapchat is a tool to evaluate against that brand strategy. Snapchat won’t be a good fit for every brand. It’s not a strategy unto itself.
But for brands where Snapchat is a good fit, this is a good time for experimentation, and not to evaluate it the same way marketers would a thirty second spot.
I like how Taco Bell CMO Marisa Thalberg put it: “We don’t corporatize this. We don’t hyper-manage it.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Here’s a cartoon I drew about Snapchat in 2013.
Jason says
June 20, 2016 at 7:18 amAs an Art Director and a born illustrator, I appreciate your work! This post has me thinking and was curious on your thoughts of how brands spend the majority of their digital/marketing budget on tactics that do not convert? Whether it be banner ads or youtube preroll ads as if there is anything left to beat out of it and fail to see the numbers? It’s frustrating to see so much efficiency spent in doing things that shouldn’t have been done in the first place.
Naheed says
June 21, 2016 at 7:09 amSnapchat has the potential to change the way B2B marketers do business. I’m not saying B2B marketers should jump on the bandwagon and start producing content, but we should see this as a clear sign that the way millennials consume media is very different than the traditional audience.
The rise of Facebook taught us to think about word-of-mouth differently. It took Twitter to make marketers think about the power of writing shorter copy. Instagram changed the way we think about visual marketing. Vines forced B2B marketers to reconsider the length of our video marketing. The broad adoption of Snapchat will challenge marketers to produce content that is only immediately relevant; ‘evergreen’ may become a thing of the past.
Sandro Prezzi says
July 8, 2016 at 7:51 amIt’s not about understanding technology.. it’s about understanding people. Not facebook or Instagram nor Twitter changed the way people communicate – they just “technologies” (digitalise) existing tools of the real world and made them accessible online.
People follow people. And youth avoid places crowed by older people. It’s not new.. it’s the game of generations. Millennials are not that different as you might believe. They are just young. New studies show same media usage as other generations. It’s life cycle based. Once married becoming parents, their tv consumtion is rising fast – the online usage is reduced. As others before them. Not surprising – if you are tired from a hell of a day with your job and/or childern, you just want to sit back and enjoy… get entertained – mostly by tv.
BTW Snapchat lost their “immediately relevant” USP. Now they announced to skip the 24 hours availability rule. Interesting to see how this impacts to the audience (goodbye online media what forgets your sins).