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Brands are increasingly jumping on board with Snapchat by creating personal accounts, building up their friend count, and reaching audiences organically through Live Stories.
A new L2 Research study cited by Adweek provides insights into what kinds of brands are joining Snapchat, and what types of content these brands are posting to the platform.
- Brands post most often about Products (25%), Lifestyle (16%), and Events (15%). The large lead that product posts have on Snapchat is unsurprising given that sportswear (71%), beauty (57%), and fashion (54%) brands have seen the largest adoption of Snapchat. Moving forward, product posts are likely to increase. For example, unboxing videos – which feature people opening and reviewing products fresh out the box – are gaining in popularity on Snapchat, as described in a recent Digiday article.
- Still, a surprisingly large number of brands are not yet on Snapchat. 70% of the 120 brands surveyed are now active on Snapchat. This suggests that a significant number of brands still do not post to the platform. As a result, Snapchat can still serve as a useful differentiator in brands’ marketing communications. By overlooking Snapchat, these brands might be missing out on a crucial touchpoint to reach their consumers. It should be noted that this finding is based upon a relatively small sample size, and may not be representative of brand activity on Snapchat overall.
Even as more brands jump on Snapchat, though, they must keep in mind potential pitfalls on the service. Some luxury brands thus far have stayed away from Snapchat out of fear that it could dilute their brand image when conforming to Snapchat's aesthetic and formatting guidelines — a recent survey cited by Digiday found Snapchat to be social platform where users were least likely to recognize a third-party brand.
Dollars are increasingly flowing from traditional ads to digital, as strong growth in mobile, video, and social spending continue to change the face of the US media market.
Over the next five years, marketers will especially embrace mobile. Mobile will drive up spending on video, search, display, and social, and propel the migration of ad dollars away from traditional media, including newspapers and magazines.
BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report that forecasts spending trends for the major digital ad formats — including search, display, and video — and mobile vs. desktop. It also examines trajectories for social ad spending and programmatic ad buying, which cut across digital formats. Finally, the report looks at how spending on traditional media formats will grow or contract over the next five years, as digital, and particularly mobile, rises.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
- Mobile will be the fastest-growing advertising channel and buoy spending on each of the digital formats. US mobile ad revenue will rise by a 26.5% CAGR through of 2020.
- Digital video ad spending is rising faster than search and display. US digital video ad revenue will rise by a CAGR of 21.9% through 2020.
- Mobile search will overtake desktop search ad revenue by 2019. Mobile search ad spend will rise by a 25.2% CAGR, while desktop search ad revenue will decline during the same period.
- Mobile display ads, including banners, rich media, and sponsorships, will overtake desktop display-related spending even earlier, in 2017.
- Social media ads, which cut across display and video, are seeing fast adoption. US social media ad revenue, which includes video and display ads, will grow by a CAGR of 14.9% through 2020.
- The rapid embrace of programmatic ad-buying tools is fueling a dramatic uptick in the share of digital ad spending coming through programmatic channels. Programmatic transactions will be a majority of total US digital ad spend this year.
- Unlike digital, traditional ad revenue will remain flat overall through 2020. Total traditional ad revenue will rise by a CAGR of just 0.4% between 2015 and 2020.
In full, the report:
- Forecasts ad revenue for emerging digital ad channels and formats like mobile, video, social and programmatic over the next five years
- Explores why ad revenue is flowing from desktop to mobile
- Examines the stagnation of traditional advertising channels like TV, magazines, and newspapers
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