Daily Report: The Message From Snapchat

I"M VEGAN?! | SNAPCHAT Q&A!!!
Photo A paid advertisement from Kraft Foods on Snapchat featured a macaroni-and-cheese photo filter.

Snapchat is famous for its disappearing messages. Its financial success, however, may prove a very durable message.

The mobile messaging company grew up in the wake of Google, which collected data based on internet search behavior to offer ads based on your queries. It came after Facebook, which collected data based on your social behavior to intuit interests and affect your buying behavior.

As Katie Benner and Michael J. de la Merced write, Snapchat has taken a very different course: Much of the $350 million it is projected to earn this year comes from ad campaigns that count on us interacting with a brand.

This may be in the form of a geofilter, which enables a Snapchat user to pick up a sticker from a certain location, or a lens, which is often something product-related that a person can incorporate into an image of themselves.

Pokmon Go is getting a lot of attention as the first mass use of augmented reality, but maybe that credit should go to Snapchat. People are combining their own faces with Taco Bell tacos or X-Men Wolverines, and then distributing these augmented objects to their friends. People are stumbling into locations and obtaining commercial images that say what they are consuming, so they can pass them around.

Snapchat is not following you, at least not in this part of its business; it is counting on you to follow other things. And, at least when it comes to the taco transformation, it is counting on the bottomless modern desire to make things ironic unless for so many there is beauty in seeming like a popular Mexican fast food.

Considering that almost half of Americas 18-to-34-year-olds open Snapchat every day, its almost certainly the desire for the casually comical. That is the demographic advertisers crave, since consumption and brand loyalty are not yet fixed in the age group.

When you think about it, this is a powerful development. Instead of Google- and Facebook-type offers for stuff people can accrue, Snapchat is offering ways we can pour ourselves into a product and share the personalized outcome with other consumers.

Is there enough appetite for this kind of comic yet sincere interaction for Snapchat to earn its current valuation of $19 billion? Or do we burn out on it?

That sounds a little like a how high is up? question. A casual look at our entertainment choices indicates that the appetite for celebrating ourselves and our products is unquenchable.

All this, and the scale of Snapchats ambitions, raises valid questions of what else it might need to figure out, in addition to selling (apparently for much less net revenue) the regular ads it offers on its space.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/technology/daily-report-the-message-from-snapchat.html