How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds(bloomberg.com) |
How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds(bloomberg.com) |
For the past 50 years brand strategy has largely been (fairly) well characterised. Conventional wisdom in the industry did well enough for brands like McDonald's and Coca Cola to expand across the world and capture generations of customers. This is in part due to an incremental pace of innovation in how customers have consumed media in this time period.
Then came along the internet and a bringing a huge stepwise change, driving not only unprecedented levels of fragmentation/segmentation/individualisation of users but also changing how we interact with and consume media.
The generation of "millennials" and "digital natives" are people who now spend more time on the internet than in front of a TV.
Facebook, with their 1Bn+ daily active users who are known to spend nearly 18 hours a week on the Facebook mobile app, saw the value in Snapchat - younger users don't have a Facebook account. It's uncool, it's creepy with its privacy policies. Snapchat has extremely strong market share on viewership for a generation of users that are arguably the most impressionable/valuable. This same generation don't really watch TV. Considering individual brands would spend hundreds of millions on TV, if Snapchat can capture even a fraction of this media budget, they'll be hugely profitable.
NB I chose McDonald's and Coke as brands as they are two good examples of previously invincible global brands that are now showing significant decline. They also had huge media budgets. For the purposes of my argument, I've chosen to ignore other market trends such as growing health awareness but my point still stands.
Not sure about Coke but McDonald's is doing pretty well these days. Its stock recently hit an all-time high and is one of the best performers this year, following their success with all-day breakfast.
I don't think the users (whatever their age) of Snapchat find value because of the advertisers; that seems to reverse cause and effect.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-sp...
Let's not forget that human sexuality plays a core component in business motivations and the environment in which this XX billion $ company was formed.
It sounds like part of the claim is that the app/platform is intentionally a little clunky and unintuitive so as to prevent an influx of the older generation a la Facebook.
I think. I'm not between 14 and 24 so I don't know the first thing about Snapchat.
As far as keeping out "olds", look at what Tinder did by demanding a premium from 30+ users: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tinder-charging-people-30-t....
No. It comes from Autoadmit/Xoxohth, which is like Hacker News for East Coast lawyers in "biglaw" (although I doubt that most XO posters actually made biglaw). In the mid-2000s, it developed a robust troll culture and people brought back the archaic (Dickens Era) usage, "poors". This led into the nouning of other adjectives to describe people in a derogatory way: in addition to poors, fats, dumbs, olds.
Most of us, in the early days, were relatively normal people with trolling habits. We weren't actually assholes; we were just pretending to be "prestigious" shitheads on the Internet. However, the gray-hat trolls eventually left when some actual assholes (black hat trolls) started getting in the game.
It's a stupid usage and I'm rather disgusted that people would use it without irony. Using "poors" and "fats" and "olds", unless you're making fun of the American upper class, doesn't make you hip and it certainly doesn't make you "prestigious". It makes you an idiot with subpar grammar.
Never did I (now an "old") think that I'd see that kind of shit, used without irony, in the mainstream press. It's a stupid usage. I'd be offended if I cared, but mostly I find people who use it to be uneducated and silly.
For those who are unaware, Xoxohth/AutoAdmit is like Hacker News for lawyers, but with passive-aggression replaced by active aggression, and with the racism more overt. I wouldn't go there. It's ugly and a big waste of time.
Anyway, it seems like a great thing for making memes on worldstarhiphop but as far as having the kind of economic impact that companies like Coca Cola have .... well I guess it's fun for the valley community to think this way.
Snapchat does what tweenage girls want. Because the girls are on it, the guys are on it.
Those girls age (hopefully before they), get pregnant, give birth to another set of tweenage girls and another "hip" service takes its place.
Cue Elton John singing "Circle of Life".
As for why a fat, old record producer cares: tweenage girls are the only demographic spending any discretionary money (from the wallets of the "olds", natch). Everybody else is tapped out or doesn't give a damn or both.
Eventually they die.
One thing I am aware of is that kids have a lot of free time and they do a lot of different things, is what I understand.
1. http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-constantly-mentioni...
edit: I guess this is a good example — without deep familiarity with the app you could assume they don't post to their Story if it's empty, or could believe that snaps received in the message view (not the main list) were recently taken (those have been sent from the camera roll)
Coca-Cola Amatil in Australia has even started making beer and cider [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands [1] http://ausfoodnews.com.au/2014/01/13/coca-cola-amatil-launch...
I'm genuinely curious, no judgement.
Similarly the very most productive software engineer I've ever worked with practically lived off of diet coke, just as John Carmack did while doing amazing things at Id. Similarly, plenty of olympic athletes drink soda, including one who was a second degree connection of mine in high school and who later won multiple gold medals.
None of this means soda is healthy, but if it were "insanely bad for you", then it simply wouldn't be possible people to consume it heavily and still be top performers or live into their 90s with decent health.
Most of the time, I'm gone for two week stretches. 12 cans over 14 days isn't that much at all. I usually limit myself to a can a day.
It says "usage is down for 18-34 year olds" so 18-34 year olds are not kids, not like 14 year olds. And saying it is down is very different from saying "kids don't watch TV, they use snapchat, therefore brands like Coca Cola are irrelevant."
This is what I'm saying. There is this unthinking, uncritical, and unskeptical self-congratulatory sort of "ding dong the witch is dead" about anything related to "traditional media" and the reason for this is "because Internet" or something like that. But, I think it is a very naive view and is fun to say but it's not actually real.
I mean, this article is an example of just weak evidence. Again, it is not about kids but its about the 18-34 demographic. But let's see, it says:
"In 2011, 21.7 million young adults tuned in to their TV sets. By the end of last month, that figure had fallen to 17.8 million, according to Nielsen figures."
OK, whatever that means, let's just accept the numbers as they are presented. Just elementary math tells us 17/21 is hardly nothing or "no one is watching" anymore.
Now, the article cited, to support this claim, says:
"In the era of smartphones and Netflix, it’s no surprise that traditional TV is losing relevance for younger viewers."
Wait ... so instead of watching actual TV sets with bunny ears, they are watching things like Netflix (which I understand is much different than Snapchat) .... OK, let's peruse the content of Netflix .... OK, wait a minute, all this content on Netflix looks familiar ....
Do you mean to tell me all this stuff on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are mostly .... from the TV? With the exception of a handful of originals, which honestly are produced in a similar way as the TV, most of this stuff coming from the evil "dead witch," the TV. I don't find a lot of "Vine Comps" on Netflix. Also, on some level it seems silly to me to point to Netflix and Amazon as evidence that these other things are dead; it's not like Amazon Originals are like "The-New-Internet-Meme.com" they are much more like "In addition HBO, Showtime, Starz and Cinemax there Amazon and Netflix" than some totally fundamental shift in the kind of content consumed ... whether it is over bunny ears or choppy wifi is sort of an implementation detail to some extent than a cultural revolution.
If one wants to say "People don't watch TV anymore" and then what they really mean is "They watch ABC shows on the ABC App on the iPad instead" .... Then claims like the "The Coca Cola brand is dead because Snapchat" seem to lose their luster.
I hate to "disrupt" the groupthink. :)
these kids don't watch any tv
I assumed that you'd be able to extrapolate the behavior of the 18-34 year olds to younger people, and I assumed that you didn't mean any literally.
Of "youth" (13-24 year olds)[1]:
96% watch online video ("Youtube and similar, social media") for an average of 11.3 hours per week.
71% watch online subscription services (Netflix etc) for an average of 10.8 hours a week
57% watch free online TV services (amctv.com, ABC app etc), average of 6.4 hours a week
81% watch scheduled TV, average 8.3 hours a week
56% watch catchup or recorded TV, average of 7.5 hours a week.
Additionally, "The five most influential figures among Americans ages 13-18 are all YouTube creators"[2]
I'm not sure if this supports or doesn't support your arguments. I know I sure don't agree with the claim "The Coca Cola brand is dead because Snapchat". I didn't really understand the argument there at all.
[1] http://sandbox.break.com/acumen/Acumen%20Constant%20Content_...
[2] http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/survey-youtube-stars-mo...
It makes texting/email/fb feel so boring and almost formal. I feel comfortable Snapping my friend I haven't talked to in a couple months something random, whereas I would be less likely to hit them up randomly on text.
Stories, the Snapchat broadcast medium, also let you feel more connected with your friends and loose connections. I don't need to talk to some friends every day, but it feels nice that I can share these silly, mundane experiences with them.
This is a much richer experience than browsing my friends' highly curated photos on their Instagram, their boring/activist/humblebrag FB statuses, or their pure text tweets.
There are plenty of examples of how younger people develop their own complex (rich) social norms and behaviors which confuse the fuck out of "olds".
The (now outdated) behavior of "deleting" (ie deactivating) your Facebook account every night and reactivating every morning (so you couldn't get tagged and embarrassed) is a great example that confused most older people.
Any in-depth references that support this? (Strikes me as curious, as I watch my 6-year-old playing a fairly elaborate Minecraft map…)
Here is an interesting article that was posted on HN -
http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...
I don't mean this as dismissively as it may sound, but it seems possible you'll figure this out in a personal sense over the coming years.
I do. Biologically? Maybe. Mentally? I doubt it a lot. I know lots of people of all ages who use Facebook for the most vapid, shallow, and empty experiences. Socially or not.
I suppose that's why TV is now the province of the 50+ set.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/t...
As an older person, I really find it difficult to care if a particular friend didn't like an Instagram pic I posted. I really don't care how quickly they liked it and I don't even know which of my Facebook friends don't follow me on Instagram. They are all social interactions that add complexity and richness to the experience, and I don't pay attention to any of them.
I also like experiences such as a good hike, bike, camping trip, eating out, etc...
Sending a friend a pic or even interacting on facebook doesn't really do much to further the friendship.