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.
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.
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.
