When a portal, a platform, or a social, are growing too slowly, they should try to prove they can provide a high turnover for advertisers. Let’s take Snapchat as an example: as I have explained in my post “Do Facebook and Instagram’s popularity mean the end is near Snapchat?”, the only way the instant social can survive the attack of its competitors is to adopt new solutions and strategies. Easy breezy: Snapchat, through its parent company Snap, has purchased Placed paying it over 200 million dollars. Read it in Italian.
It was a clever move: considering the loss in the Snap share price recorded in the last month, increasing advertisers trust in its ROI, could be key to its salvation (Aw Snap: Snapchat parent company’s value plummets after earnings report).
Indeed, Placed is expected to send measurement systems, such as Snap To Store, into overdrive so to allow advertisers to know exactly how their ads posted on Snapchat can translate into a return on investments offline. Which will hopefully lead to new investments into advertising on the social medium.
For those who don’t know what we are talking about, Placed is a start-up founded in 2011 in Seattle, which owns a platform for the analysis of the geolocation of consumers and measures the impact that digital advertising has on users’ behaviors starting from the place they are found. Examining their online and offline behavior, it defines whether there is a correspondence between visualized ads, videos and banners and in-store purchases (Snapchat parent Snap acquires location analytics startup Placed for more than $200M).
We are talking about a huge amount of data which are really important for users’ profiling. Last April, Snap To Store beta version identified a few Snapchatters’ interesting habits: 80% of them uses the social media while eating out at the restaurant, 66% of them use it while shopping at the mall, 50% when at the gym and 49% when transiting through airports (80 percent of Snapchat users take snaps in restaurants).
When a user visits a shop, and applies a geofileter sponsored by Snapchat to a Story or a private message, Snap To Store will notify them when their friends, after having seen his geofiltered Snap, visit the same place. This results in a closed advertising loop, with a lower number of users compared to Facebook or Instagram, but more efficient, reactive and receptive.
Wendy’s fast food chain, was among the first to test Snap to Store to promote one of its sandwiches, by creating some sponsored geofilters, and, over a week, they managed to convey 42 thousand viewers into its restaurants.
As I have already said before, interactive and creative advertising can contribute to develop relevant businesses even when the audience is not huge. And this seems to be, at the moment, Snapchat’s strategy.
What is your opinion about interactive, creative and geolocated advertising? Tweet @agostinellialdo.
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