Snapchat has recently been the subject of fervor conversations around campus and in marketing news. The disappearing photo/video app introduced a new animated option called “Lenses” that includes creative filters before taking a snap. These new filters including exploding heart eyes, skin-aging filter, and the infamous rainbow vomit option. Snapchat has exploded within the past year, gaining more and more traction amongst the teenage demographic. Brands are noticing this fast-growing trend and want to tap into part of the 100 million daily active users.
The platform offers a space where advertisers are eligible to capture audience’s exclusive attention for the duration of the “life” of that story, through Snapchat’s “Story” feature. This feature enables engagement rates as high as 80%, as seen by Taco Bell’s new pivot into heavy digital marketing. More recently, Snapchat enables brands pay to imprint snaps through filters. W Hotels has created postmark filters to overlay over photos and videos serves to attract a younger audience to the brand. I believe this underrated social media platform has potential for huge profitability in 2016. As Snapchat continuously innovates new features to add to the existing platform, brands are able to spend money to bring affinity to them. This version of mere exposure effect will trigger a stimuli in audience’s brain which will potentially start to affect people’s purchasing decisions. From observing the behaviours of not only myself, but of my peers at university, Snapchat has integrated as a communication tool in our daily lives. The likes of traditional advertising are more likely to be ineffective, especially when targeting Millennials and Generation Edge, when most of this demographic is glued to their phones. Snapchat offers a plethora of avenues to target the younger, teenage demographic, but it is up to the companies to decide whether or not they want to pay the heft price tag of $450,000.
