Snapchat Marketing Trends Shaping 2015

At the start of 2015, most marketing budgets treated Snapchat as a curiosity, an app for teenagers sending disappearing selfies, not a channel worth a line item. By the end of the year that had changed considerably, and the shift didn’t happen all at once. It happened in a series of specific product launches, each one making the platform look a little more like something a marketing department could plan around.

January: Discover changes the conversation

Snapchat opened the year by launching Discover, giving a small set of media partners, CNN, ESPN, Vice, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, BuzzFeed and others, dedicated channels inside the app with content built specifically for vertical, swipe-through consumption. Discover mattered less for the ad inventory it created, which was limited to those partners, and more for what it signaled: Snapchat was positioning itself as a media platform, not just a messaging app, and it expected content built natively for it rather than repurposed from elsewhere.

Spring: geofilters open the door for local and event marketing

Sponsored geofilters, location-based overlays users could apply to their snaps, became available to brands in the first half of the year. They were a meaningful shift because they didn’t interrupt anyone. A user chose to apply a filter to their own content, which meant brands were getting distribution through voluntary use rather than paid placement alone. Retailers used them for store openings, and event organizers used them to blanket a venue with branded overlays that attendees applied themselves.

May: Taco Bell shows what native creative looks like

Taco Bell’s Cinco de Mayo Lens, which turned a user’s face into a giant taco using the newly available face-tracking format, became one of the most-viewed pieces of branded content the platform had hosted at that point. It mattered as a case study because nothing about it looked like a traditional ad. It was a toy people wanted to play with and send to friends, and that voluntary sharing is what gave it reach far beyond what the media spend alone would have bought.

September: Lenses launch broadly

Snapchat rolled Lenses out as a standing feature rather than a one-off campaign tool, giving every user access to face-tracking effects daily. For brands, this raised the bar: a sponsored Lens now had to compete with an entire feature users engaged with constantly, which meant novelty alone stopped being enough. The Lenses that performed were the ones built around a moment, a holiday, a movie release, a cultural event, rather than a generic brand mascot.

October: Snap Ads arrive

Snapchat introduced full-screen, vertical video ads inserted between Stories, often described internally as a “3V” format: vertical, video, full-screen. This was the platform’s first real push into an ad format that didn’t depend on a user choosing to engage first, closer to a conventional buy than a geofilter or Lens. It signaled that Snapchat intended to build a real advertising business, not stay a platform where brands could only participate through novelty stunts.

The year-end picture

By December, Snapchat had gone from roughly 100 million reported daily active users earlier in the year to a platform major agencies were building dedicated strategy around, largely because its core audience, teenagers and young adults, was proving hard to reach anywhere else at the same scale. The throughline across every launch that year, Discover, geofilters, Lenses, Snap Ads, was the same: formats that worked because they were made for the app’s native behavior, not adapted from television or from Facebook.

Going into 2016, the open question was whether Snapchat could keep that native, slightly rough-edged feel as ad formats grew more conventional, or whether formalizing the ad business would make the platform start to feel like everywhere else. For 2015 specifically, the brands that won were the ones that treated Snapchat as its own medium rather than another distribution channel for content built somewhere else.