Snapchat has released an infomercial video featuring its founder and CEO Evan Spiegel promoting its 3V advertising approach to attract brands to place advertisements on its platform. Snapchat has been very serious and aggressive about capturing the interests of advertisers to support its business model since late last year.
The 25-year-old Siegel explains in about 90 seconds the meaning and virtues of Snapchat's 3V, its nickname for "vertical, video views," He also highlights the fact that its mobile app fills up the whole screen and poses full-screen ad slots as its greatest advantage over its rivals such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
A slideshow of company graphs and facts accompanies the video on a page dedicated for ads on Snapchat's website. The company claims that more than 60 percent of 13 to 34-year-old smartphone users in the U.S. are certified Snapchatters and more than two billion videos are viewed everyday. If one places an advertisement on Snapchat, it is very likely that almost 100 million daily active users will see the ad.
Spiegel's view that "people just don't rotate their phones" is beginning to influence other mobile, video and social players and the company claims that the completion rate of ads is nine times more than the horizontal oriented ads in mobile phones.
The Snapchat app uses verticality in all the short-form content distributed through its messaging, Discover and Live Stories channels. Vertical drawings, pictures and videos can be sent back and forth among Snapchatters. Select media partners like Cosmopolitan, Comedy Central, Daily Mail, Vice and ESPN publish on the Discover channels daily. Live Stories are shared videos from around the world and at important events, such as the recent American Music Awards that drew 11.5 million Snapchatters.
Movie studios have also advertised on the app. The big summer releases such as "Jurassic World," "Pitch Perfect 2" and "Mad Max: Fury Road" were greatly advertised on Snapchat, with the aim of duplicating or outperforming the opening success of "Furious 7," whose ad Snapchat claims was either liked or loved by 93 percent of the Snapchatters that saw it.
Photo: TechCrunch | Flickr
