| For the non-believers of Snapchat, here is where I think its value lies: 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.