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Snapchat: Next In Line

By now, you may have seen the little cartoon ghost logo on the mobile application known as Snapchat. In its embryonic stages, it was a silly app used by young teens to send picture and video messages that would disappear after a view. These days, this silly app garnishes 150 million users daily and is starting to become big business for marketers.

All it took was four years and several added features to make this app more used than Twitter. What does this all mean for brands? It provides an unsaturated platform that gives you the ability to reach millions of people with engaging content, instantly.

eMarketer reported that in order to accommodate those businesses that are looking to reach the ever so difficult market of young Millennials and Generation Z, Snapchat has added and expanded its advertising platform to include a larger range of video ads, more sponsored geo-filters and additional sponsored lenses. They have also launched several new initiatives that will give advertisers what they’ve been wanting from the start: the ability to target their audience rather than the spray and pray method used so much in the past.

Some of these new initiatives include a product called “Snap Audience Match”, which enables marketers to take existing lists of email addresses and mobile device ID’s and cross match that info with Snapchat’s own pool of consumer data, according to The Wall Street Journal. There is also “Snapchat Lifestyle Categories”, which lets the brand direct particular ads to people who view certain types of videos such as sports content or make up tutorials. Early test campaigns have shown that users are viewing the ad content in its entirety because of how relevant each ad is to their interests and what they are viewing. Talk about blowing VCR’s out of the water.

According to Seb Joseph from Business Insider, one such company to take full advantage of Snapchat and its early stages of offering ad space is Adidas. Adidas utilized its brand ambassadors, like music artists Stormzy, Pharrell Williams and Soccer superstar Paul Pogba, to craft engaging content within their Snapchat Stories. Using the new audience targeting by Snapchat, Adidas witnessed vide retention rates 80 to 90 percent higher than its ads on Youtube.

As an ancillary tactic, Adidas gave rapper Stormzy his own geo-filter that was seen by nearly three million people at an event with only 400 attendees. Talk about a major return on investment.

Snapchat may have started as an app that wasn’t geared towards brands and businesses, but these days they are making serious waves in the advertising world. As part of a group of advanced marketers, Awlogy looks at moves like this in a favorable light. Combine out of the box thinking with an audience focused lens? You’ve got our attention.

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