“Gary told you so”, or the secret key to Snapchat’s marketing success

In 2013, Gary Vaynerchuk predicted that Snapchat would soon be the biggest social media marketing tool and urged advertisers and brands to use it. As today is #Snapchatday (yes, that’s a thing), it’s the perfect time to support the prediction.

The problem about Snapchat is that it’s really, I mean REALLY, confusing and hard to figure out if you are not a Millennial or tween, i.e. born with a smartphone in your hands (and that IS on purpose). So when dear G. made this statement, although people believed his flair, everyone was quite skeptical.

Now we are in 2016 and Snapchat has an estimated ad revenue of $300 million for the year and is valued at $16 billion, this are looking differently. I could not help but share this “I told you so” video from Gary Vee and give my two cents on it below.

The thing that I absolutely love and strikes me most is this idea of ATTENTION.

Forget about metrics and likes, comments and impressions. What matters and what Snapchat allows you to gain, is the attention of users.

In a world flodded with information, getting these few seconds of attention from users is the key to influencing their behaviour. On Snapchat, if you do not view content when it is available anf for the seconds it is set to be viewable, it’s gone. It does not mean that people cannot select what they watch and swipe away, but they still pay more attention because content is volatile. I truly believe in the importance of conscious attention in consumer engagement and in its power (more on this in a next post about my research). Far from being perfect, I think Snapchat is indeed activating this very important feature of digital consumer behaviour. Time to get your Snapchat on!