School districts in Wayne County have placed a proposal on the November 8th ballot to provide added funding for our schools. It is the “Regional Enhancement Millage Proposal.”
If approved by the entire county, the 2 mil proposal will generate approximately $6.2 million from Dearborn but the District will receive $7.8 million in additional funding for our schools. Money would go to local schools starting this year and the millage expires after six years. Read more
School districts in Wayne County have placed a proposal on the November 8th ballot to provide added funding for our schools. It is the “Regional Enhancement Millage Proposal.”
If approved by the entire county, the 2 mil proposal will generate approximately $6.2 million from Dearborn but the District will receive $7.8 million in additional funding for our schools. Money would go to local schools starting this year and the millage expires after six years. Read more
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Using the list below- You and a partner are to write 5 new headlines for 5 different products using the headline guidelines listed below. After writing the headline, create a slogan that helps describe the product.
1. Announcing
“Now announcing the secrets to acne treatment.”
“Announcing: Going out of business sale!”
2. Secrets of “How to Discover the Secrets to Better Intimacy.”
“Order now, and Discover the Secrets of Success!”
3. New “Now Announcing This New Secret That Everybody Is Talking About!”
“Discover New Secrets to Weight Loss!”
4. Now “The Time To Buy Is Right Now.”
“There Has Never Been a Time Like Right Now!”
5. Amazing “Order Now for Your Amazing New Kit”
“Now Introducing the Most Amazing New Vacuum Cleaner”
6. Facts (You Should Know) “Facts You Should Know About Healthcare”
“Facts You Should Know About Weight Loss”
7. Breakthrough
“Click Here For Your Breakthrough New Report”
“Now Announcing a Medical Breakthrough”
8. At Last “At Last, an Easy Way to Make Money Online!”
“At Last, the Answers You Deserve!”
9. Advice to “Advice to Lower Your Mortgage Payments by Half!”
“Advice on How to Stop Acne Before It Happens!”
10. Truth of “Do You Want to Know the Truth of How to Lose Weight?”
“At Last, Learn the Truth of How to Live a Better Lifestyle”
11. Protect “How to Protect Your Family Even When You Are Away From Home”
“At Last, a Secure Way to Protect Your Investments”
12. Life “Here’s How to Live the Life You’ve Always Dreamed About”
“Discover the Secrets to a Happy Love Life”
13. Here “Here, You Will Find What You Have Been Looking For”
“If You Want to Get Rich Online, Start Here”
14. Discover
“Discover the Secret New Way to Protect Your Investment”
“Here is Where You Will Discover Secrets That Will Change Your Life”
15. Yes “Yes, At Last, Your Search Is Over!”
“Yes, Send Me My Free Report!”
Sorry I am not here today, last minute change for a medical issue. Hope you are all rested from the break. Sorry I am not here today, last minute change for a medical issue. Hope you are all rested from the break.
1st and 4th hour- Marketing Management
This is a 15 point summative assignment and can’t be made up unless absent today.
Create a circle map for each of the key words starting on pg. 113.
Options Acceptance Mirror Image Rule
Bilateral acceptance Unilateral Acceptance
Rejection by the offeree Death or Insanity of either offeror or offeree
Pg. 125 Duress Recission
Economic Threats Undue Influence
2nd, 3rd and 6th Marketing
Please go to my blog and read the two articles that I posted. You are to read each article and summarize each. ( no less than half page per article) Each article is worth 15 points each.
You can work with one other person on this assignment.
Go to my blog and it is under the marketing class blog.
This is a great article that discusses a local start up Michigan business. Read the following article and write a half page summary that explains how to use marketing in a business. This article review is worth 15 summative points.
Title Boxing CEO John Rotche: Ann Arbor breeds entrepreneurship
ANN ARBOR — Entrepreneur John Rotche says he has always had a good foundation on which to grow.That same principle applies to growing a business, he says.
A solid foundation is the key to turning a business into a successful franchise because without a strong base, growing and expanding your brand can go very wrong very quickly, according to Rotche.
Knowing the proper steps to take to add franchisees, having the resources and proper plans in place is what took Ann Arbor-based Title Boxing Company from system-wide sales of $2.5 million in 2012 to just under $60 million last year.
“The reason we were able to do that is because we followed the right processes,” Rotche said. “By the end of next year, this brand will be $75-80 million.”
Year to date, the kickboxing and boxing gym chain is up 28 percent over last year and has been named the fastest growing franchise in the U.S.
Thanks to a new partnership with iconic boxing brand Everlast, Title will be opening one new gym a week in the U.S. and internationally. The partnership will allow Title to execute its concept in international markets under the name Everlast Fitness, where Everlast holds the naming rights for Title.
“We know the roots of boxing are really deep internationally, especially in Europe,” Rotche said.
The partnership also brought part of the Everlast brand into Rotche’s Ann Arbor-based franchise-development firm Franworth. In the year since it was created, the firm has secured five brands that it partners with to help grow the brand from smaller companies to franchised businesses.
With the partnership, Franworth provides administration, legal, franchise sales and more for the emerging company. In exchange, the business owners agree to provide support for the new franchises.
“The deal is, they have to come with the deal,” Rotche said.
So instead of the company just selling out to Rotche, the business owners bring the expertise of operating the business, and Franworth helps them grow the franchising side of it. Rotche said it works because he doesn’t know the first thing about making a latte, for example, but he knows how to grow a business.
Ann Arbor-based Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea is one of the brands that has partnered with Franworth and is now working to expand its locations beyond its Washtenaw County footprint.
“It’s been great. We’ve been able to get more exposure,” said Sweetwaters owner Lisa Bee. “For a very locally-based company, it’s hard for people to see us outside of our area.”
Bee went on to say her company has been able to find numerous ways to save money in terms of marketing and development due to Franworth’s relationships in the industry.
Rotche said it’s important to him to mentor growing businesses, because of the influences in his life that helped shape him.
Brand loyalty
Originally from Chicago, Rotche came to Ann Arbor after being recruited by Bo Schembechler to play football at the University of Michigan.
However, while he was being recruited, Rotche broke his neck and in an instant his dreams of playing football in The Big House were gone.
“I wasn’t ever supposed to walk again,” Rotche said.
Despite being recruited by several schools to play college ball, those offers were no longer on the table following his injury.
Except for one.
“When you’re being recruited, you’re everything to them until you can’t play anymore,” Rotche said. “Then you don’t hear from them anymore, with the exception of Michigan. Bo Schembechler said ‘I still want you on the team,’ and that was before I even knew how to walk again.”
Schembechler’s commitment to Rotche created a loyalty to the college and the city that sticks with Rotche to this day.
Rotche joined the team, where he worked with the strength and conditioning coaches in hopes of one day training athletes. Since he was no longer able to play himself, he thought that was a great career choice, but that didn’t come to be.
Along the way he diverted his path when he began working for Ann Arbor-based Domino’s Pizza. Working early on inside the Domino’s headquarters, Rotche spent his days running pizza from the on-site kitchen to various offices around the complex.
“My big promotion was going to a store that had a car so I could deliver pizza to people,” Rotche jokes. “When I look back, Domino’s Pizza was probably the greatest training ground that I could hope for.”
Eventually, Rotche began working with Domino’s founder Tom Monaghan, who became a mentor for the young businessman. After Domino’s was sold to Bain Capital, Rotche was recruited to work for Krispy Kreme donuts.
After helping take that company public, Rotche eventually left Krispy Kreme to focus on a business he bought in Ann Arbor called Ann Arbor Duct Cleaning. Rebranded as Ductz, the company became the largest duct cleaning service in the U.S., according to Rotche.
Rotche eventually sold Ductz and another business Hoodz – which focused on cleaning hood systems – to a Birmingham-based company, opening the door for Rotche to explore his next option.
Mentoring
In 2009, Jeff Dudan was in direct competition with Rotche with his business, AdvantaClean. Dudan recalls meeting Rotche at an industry conference and being blown away by his attitude.
“When we met, we both knew we were competitors and he was much further along with his business,” Dudan said. “Instead of being negative in any way, he was incredibly gracious. We talked and connected.”
During the conference, the various businesses were given 10 minutes to present their brands and concepts to a group on investors and interested parties. Dudan was shocked when Rotche spent half of his time supporting the efforts of AdvantaClean instead of promoting his own brand.
“John does business the right way. John understands the value of relationship. He brings value to the relationships,” Dudan said. “Sometimes it’s business value, sometimes it’s personal value.
“He continues to reach backward and lend a hand to people coming behind him.”
As with his plans to train athletes, another opportunity diverted Rotche’s initial focus when he got involved with Title Boxing.
“I was actually looking to be a franchisee of theirs. I was looking to open a Title Boxing Club here in Ann Arbor,” Rotche said.
Through his ties to U-M, Rotche has mentored former players in the business world for years and focused on helping companies franchise. So when he showed interest in Title, the gym chain saw an even bigger opportunity.
“I started a mentorship program to help other young business leaders, in particular in franchising,” Rotche said. “I’d been mentoring these folks when Title Boxing Company approached me and in 2012 I assumed control of the company.”
Title now has more than 175 gyms opened in the U.S. with 250 more in development in the U.S. and Mexico.
That experience led to the formation of Franworth last year and spurred the partnerships with Sweetwaters and Everlast.
For a brand trying to grow beyond just being known as an Ann Arbor coffee shop, Bee said Sweetwaters couldn’t have asked for a better partner.
“In just the initial conversations that we had, John had a lot of the same values that we have. He’s a very steady, calm, very approachable person,” Bee said. “Anytime there are questions that come up or issues that need to be resolved, it’s always a very thoughtful way of handling it. That resonated well with us.”
Another brand under Franworth control is Spavia, a Colorado-based affordable-spa service with seven locations in the U.S. and nine under development. Franworth is also working with Kalamata, a Michigan-based Greek street food restaurant with locations in Troy and Royal Oak.
Along with his efforts in Ann Arbor, Rotche is a member of an NFL bootcamp that helps football players transition into their lives after football and how to properly invest their time and money.
And while his day jobs keep his plate full, Rotche couldn’t resist when he was recruited once again by a Michigan head football coach. When Jim Harbaugh returned to Ann Arbor last season, he asked Rotche to be a part of the program.
Harbaugh was a senior during Rotche’s freshman season as part of the team. Rotche is now the associate director of football operations at U-M and helps with a list of tasks, including staffing various offices, recruiting and post-football success.
“It’s a lot of fun because when I’m not growing these businesses in here, I’m working down at 1200 S. State St.,” Rotche said. “I take special pride in being able to mentor the incoming players.”
Because of his success in the business world, Rotche said he’s able to show the young players that not only are the resources at Michigan to help them succeed on the field, there are people in the program who can help players transition to the next phase in their lives once football is over for them.
“I think I was meant to help mentor other people, and that’s my world now,” Rotche said.
Staying in Ann Arbor
Growing his company and the success of the brands he partners with in Ann Arbor is important to Rotche, he said, because he feels the city embodies an entrepreneurial spirit.
“Michigan is a hot bed for franchising in general,” Rotche said. “Ann Arbor is such a vibrant community, and it breeds entrepreneurship.”
He points to companies like Little Caesars, Molly Maid, and Domino’s as examples of local companies that are growing and seeing great success. Rotche is also proud of the international recognition that Ann Arbor has received in the business community for the entrepreneurs that have come from the city.
In 1992, the International Franchise Association recognize Monaghan as the Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2002, David McKinnon of Ann Arbor-based Molly Maid won the same award and in 2012 Rotche was the recipient.
With three internationally recognized entrepreneurs building their companies in Ann Arbor, Rotche said it just make sense to keep his company in the city.
Building Franworth in Ann Arbor was part of the reason Rotche agreed to lease the entire second and third floors of the former Selo/Shevel building on the corner of Main and Liberty in Ann Arbor. When the property was remodeled by developer Reza Rahmani, Rotche decided he wanted to move his new company into the space, particularly because of what it means to Ann Arbor.
“We’re so proud of the building because it’s such an iconic part of downtown,” Rotche said.
When the building was finished, Rahmani named the building The Franworth Building.
And while having his company name on the building is an honor, Rotche said he’s just as proud of being able to help people in the city grow their businesses and realize their dreams, just as he was able to achieve his.
“Michigan has been such a part of me and making me who I am, the opportunities that it’s given me,” Rotche said. “Ann Arbor is home for me.”
Matt Durr is a business reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Email him atmattdurr@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter.
This is a great article that summarizes how a business uses marketing. Read the following article and write a half page summary that explains how to use marketing in a business. This article review is worth 15 summative points.
Shark Tank’ Star Robert Herjavec’s Top 5 Small-Business Marketing Tips
MARCH 28, 2016
When Robert Herjavec wanted to start his own company, people discouraged him. They said he couldn’t do it. He had zero experience, he didn’t have a business degree and he knew nothing about running a business.
The headstrong Shark Tank star investor steamrolled ahead anyway. In 1990, he launched his first company, BRAK Systems, which he later sold to AT&T.
“I only knew that I loved what I do and how to work hard,” Herjavec told Entrepreneur. Today, Herjavec Group, his Toronto-based Internet security firm, has grown from three workers in 2003 to 220 employees strong, and it’s on pace to bank $150 million in revenue this year, according to the company.
Related: Shark Tank Star Robert Herjavec on the 5 Worst Sales Sins
Herjavec’s commitment to taking the risky entrepreneurial leap — despite the naysayers, and he had plenty of them — has more than paid off. So what if he didn’t have formal training? He also didn’t possess the needed marketing know-how, at least not at first and not all on his own. But that was fine by him.
“Like many entrepreneurs, we didn’t really know what to do at first,” he says. “As a startup, it’s almost overwhelming. I learned that’s where a third party comes in to help you. They take the marketing pressure off so you can do more of what you love to do — your business.”
Countless marketing agencies the world over aim to do just that. One such company is Deluxe Corporation. Herjavec announced a new partnership with the Shoreview, Minn.-based firm last week. Together, they unveiled a series of small-business marketing videos. The short “Behind the Business” vignettes feature the multi-millionaire celebrity entrepreneur alongside a few of the companies he’s invested in on Shark Tank.
1. Target your customers where they hang out on social media.
Simply having several social-media accounts for your company isn’t enough. To fully leverage the potential for acquiring new customers on social media, you must also market to them where they live online.
“With Facebook and other social platforms, you can have highly targeted marketing campaigns to attract customers who are interested in the product or service that you have,” Herjavec says. “Find the user groups they meet up in on social and win them over there.”
Related: Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec on Great Business Pitches and Why Sales Reps Need to Be Chameleons
As an example, he points to The Natural Grip, a fitness product startup he invests in. The company makes special gloves for people who do Crossfit, gymnastics or lift weights. “That community, athletes, really likes to hang out in certain places on Facebook and we went there to find and engage them,” he says.
Marketing direct to potential customers on active fan pages and buzzy user groups within the popular social-media mecca turned out to be a smart move. It gained the sporty startup a grip of new customers, according to Herjavec.
2. Don’t be afraid to sell direct online.
Even as the ecommerce economy continues to surge, many small businesses old and new still don’t have shopping carts on their websites. Herjavec says failing to sell directly online is “foolishly leaving money on the table.” He believes that if your customers trust and believe in your brand, they’ll buy what you sell on the Internet.
Of those that do offer online shopping, the feature is often set up so poorly that it frustrates and confuses customers. The result: Potential buyers end up abandoning their shopping carts altogether and the sale is dead on arrival. “It quickly becomes such a hassle to go through with the transaction that they say ‘forget it,’” he says. “Don’t let that happen.”
If you don’t know how to set up an online shopping cart, Herjavec suggests leaving it to the pros. “There are lots of great companies that can handle it for you.”
3. Use stunning imagery to grab customers’ attention.
“People are very busy and the first thing that hits them in any marketing communication is a really pretty picture, not words,” he says, “and I know that sounds really trivial but that engages people and gets them to look at more of your outreach.”
Herjavec’s onto something here. Visual imagery is often more immediately engaging than monotonous walls of text, as the brain is widely believed to processes visuals thousands of times faster than text. Images transmit messages in an instant, not only making your marketing messages pop, but also rendering them more memorable, too.
4. Market to your customers how they like to be marketed to.
“Your customers have a certain amount of information they’re willing to absorb about your brand and certain ways they like to receive that information in over a certain amount of time,” he says. It’s your job to pay attention and learn how they are best marketed to.
How much information can they handle with each outreach? How do they prefer to be communicated with (via social-media updates, e-newsletter, text notifications, etc.)? How much communication is too much and how much is not enough? If marketing email subscribers start dropping off, find out why and adjust accordingly.
Related: 3 Online Marketing Strategies to Kick-Start Stagnant Sales
When it comes to Herjavec’s own contact preferences as a consumer, he feels being marketed to by email once every couple of weeks is more than enough. “I’m a big car guy, so a lot of the car companies market to me, but they’ve learned when enough information is enough for me and that’s once or twice a month,” he says. “Once a day is too much.”
5. Hire a marketing agency so you can do more of what you love.
Outsourcing your marketing needs to an agency dedicated to taking your brand awareness to the next level frees you up to get back to business. If you don’t have the budget to hire a marketing firm, Herjavec suggests partnering with someone you trust who has successfully marketed their own business.
Whatever you do, he says, don’t take the whole job on yourself, not if you don’t have the experience to back it up.
Related: Get the Most Out of Your Marketing Agency in 5 Ways
“I always say, if you’re not a marketing person, you didn’t start the businesses to do marketing, so don’t do it,” he says. It’s crucial that you focus your energy as a small-business owner on the core reason you started up in the first place.
“You wanted to take on the world with the product or service you had, that did something better than anybody else. And that was what you were passionate about, that that’s what caused you to quit your job, get a second mortgage or whatever the reason was.”
On a Wednesday in early February, Khaled Khaled, a 40-year-old record producer from Miami, stepped into the garden of his temporary residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles. As he does most mornings, he gave thanks for another day on earth. “Good morning,” he said to no one in particular. “Bless up.”
Snapchat photo filters
DJ Khaled, as he’s more commonly known, was once a minor figure in the music world, a creator of radio-friendly hip-hop hits and the host of a nightly show on one of Miami’s top FM stations. The rap on Khaled was that he could attract talented collaborators but wasn’t much of a musician himself. “Mostly, he just incessantly screams dumb catchphrases,” one Pitchfork reviewer complained. “And he doesn’t even do that particularly well.” This sort of thing weighed on Khaled. The critics, the haters, the people who’ve ignored his career—they didn’t want him to be in such a beautiful garden.
“I love my angels,” Khaled said, admiring the red, white, and purple cyclamens at the hotel. He saw God in those perennials. He also saw a metaphor for his own life’s journey. Khaled sees metaphors everywhere, actually, which is a major key—or as he prefers to type it out, “major ”—to his success on Snapchat, the social network where he has amassed some 6 million followers since last October. “Life is like flowers,” he observed, training his iPhone camera at the ground and holding down the record button. “You grow. You blossom. You become great.” He posted the 10-second video to Snapchat, then repaired to his bungalow to further philosophize on the power of positive thinking, hard work, and the divine. That went out to his Snapchat followers too, in a continuous series of clips.
If you want to understand Snapchat, the insanely fast-growing and—to people born before 1990—straight-up insane messaging app and media platform, DJ Khaled is your Virgil. If you were one of the 100 million people who logged in to Snapchat each day during Super Bowl weekend, his thick beard and full frame were impossible to miss. You would have seen clips of him at an impromptu concert where he was mobbed by several hundred screaming fans waving giant cardboard keys, or at a raucous party sponsored by PepsiCo, or in a pedicab he hailed after the game. “Ride wit me through the journey [to] more success,” he captioned that last video, as his chauffeur pedaled furiously.
Khaled had never heard of Snapchat when a friend suggested he check it out last year. While taking a break from touring last fall, he gave it a shot. “I didn’t really know how to use it,” he says on a recent afternoon in Los Angeles. “I was kind of just talking to myself.” Khaled filmed everything: his grooming routine, his breakfasts, his hot tub, and, especially, a Tuscan-style lion sculpture that he would often shout at while watering his plants. Mostly, he gave advice. He expounded on the importance of quality bedding (“The key to more success is to have a lot of pillows”) and regular meals (“They don’t want you to eat breakfast”). His most dramatic Snapchat moment occurred during a twilight ride on a personal watercraft in Biscayne Bay. “The key is to make it,” he repeated as he got lost on the water. Then he turned the camera on himself and added, “The key is not to drive your Jet Ski in the dark.”
Khaled made it, and since that fateful night he’s been pretty much the hottest ticket in media—the guy who’s figured out the digital property everyone wants a piece of but no one quite understands. He’s palled around with Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, created Snapchat videos on behalf of Cîroc vodka, and signed a deal to host a weekly radio show on Apple Music’s flagship station, Beats 1. His catchphrases have occasioned explainers from otherwise serious news organizations, including Time, Quartz, and––Bloomberg Businessweek. “DJ Khaled has completely cracked the platform,” says Emmanuel Seuge, senior vice president for content at Coca-Cola, one of Snapchat’s major advertisers. “He’s the king of Snapchat.”
“The vast majority of people reading this article will have a Snapchat account within 36 months”
Compared with Twitter or Facebook, Snapchat can seem almost aggressively user-unfriendly. If you’re new to the app and looking for posts by your kid, your boyfriend, or DJ Khaled, good luck. It’s hard to find somebody without knowing his or her screen name. This is by design. “We’ve made it very hard for parents to embarrass their children,” Spiegel said at a conference in January. “It’s much more for sharing personal moments than it is about this public display.”
Spiegel, who declined to be interviewed, has been cagey about Snapchat’s business prospects. Its annual revenue is small—perhaps $200 million, according to several press reports—but it has already drawn many big-name advertisers. Earlier this year, PepsiCo, Amazon.com, Marriott International, and Budweiser paid more than $1 million to have their ads appear within the company’s Super Bowl coverage, according to a person familiar with the deals. And because Snapchat has yet to really try to sell ads to the small and midsize businesses that make up most of Google’s and Facebook’s customer base, there’s a lot of potential.
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Mar. 7, 2016.Subscribe now.
Photographer: Julian Berman for Bloomberg Businessweek
As Facebook has transformed from a slightly wild place to a communications tool for parents, teachers, and heads of state, Snapchat’s more playful ethos, and the fact that anything posted on it disappears in 24 hours, has made it the looser, goofier social network. “You’re sending this ephemera back and forth to your friends,” says Charlie McKittrick, the head of strategy at Mother New York, an ad agency. “It’s the detritus of life. But it’s really funny.” Last September, while Mark Zuckerberg hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook’s campus, the big news at Snapchat’s offices in Venice was a feature called Lenses, which makes your selfies look like you’re vomiting a rainbow.
Snapchat is just the sort of place where DJ Khaled, in his uninhibited glory, could find an audience. Vice called his Jet Ski adventure “the greatest sitcom episode ever filmed.” Elite Daily, the “voice of Generation Y” news site, raved, “If You’re Not Following DJ Khaled On Snapchat Already, You’re Buggin’.” In December, Khaled posted to Snapchat while getting his iPhone fixed at an Apple Store. Soon he was surrounded by fans. “It was unreal,” he says. “My Snapchat has more viewers than any TV show.”
That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Khaled’s videos attract 3 million to 4 million viewers each. Given how Snapchat skews overwhelmingly tween to late-millennial, that means about the same number of young people are watching him admire flowers as are watching the biggest network sitcoms. According to Nielsen, roughly 3.3 million people age 12-34 watch The Big Bang Theory.
Even bigger than the videos posted by Khaled and Kylie Jenner—the platform’s other big star, with 10 million followers—are Snapchat’s own Live Stories. These are mashups of news events culled from the feeds of Snapchat users and produced by the company’s 100-person content team of producers, editors, and a handful of journalists, who sometimes add commentary or contribute more footage. The biggest Live Stories segments—for instance, New York’s 2015 Snowmageddon and the Coachella music festival—can draw viewership in the tens of millions. Snapchat Discover, a collection of slickly produced feeds, attracts audiences in the millions. The company says users watch roughly 8 billion videos on its platform each day, about the same number as Facebook, which has 10 times as many users as Snapchat. On a given day, according to Nielsen, 41 percent of adults in the U.S. under 35 spend time on Snapchat.
“Everybody from 14 to 24 in America, it’s either the No. 1 or No. 2 app in their lives,” after Instagram, says Gary Vaynerchuk, an angel investor and entrepreneur. Actually, it’s not just an American phenomenon: Snapchat is a top 10 most-downloaded app in about 100 countries, according to market researcher App Annie. Vaynerchuk, who has investments in Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook, likens the excitement to that of television in the early 1960s. “The vast majority of people reading this article will have a Snapchat account within 36 months,” he says. “Even if, as they’re reading this, they don’t believe me.”
Just a year ago, Snapchat was primarily known as a disappearing-message app useful for sending nude photos to lovers and lewd doodles to friends. “The people’s champ of smartphone peep shows,” this magazine put it in 2013. When Spiegel turned down a reported $3 billion buyout offer by Facebook, the then 23-year-old was mocked in the press and even by members of his own board. “If you knew the real number” offered by Facebook, Sony Pictures Chief Executive Officer and Snapchat board member Michael Lynton confessed in an e-mail that was leaked as part of the 2014 Sony hack, “you would book us all a suite at Bellevue,” the New York hospital with the famous psychiatric ward.
In late 2014, when Spiegel unveiled the company’s business plan—for a minimum of $750,000, a big brand such as Coke or Pepsi could get short video ads to run in the app for one day—he was again derided for being out of touch. “It’s like how the Kardashians are famous because they’re famous,” says Ben Winkler, the chief investment officer for the media buying firm OMD. “Snapchat is expensive because it’s expensive.” Of course, that’s another way of saying it’s expensive because lots of people want to buy it. “Almost every editor has put me in a chokehold to find out how they can get on the platform,” says Joanna Coles, the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, and since December a Snapchat board member.
Snapchat, which was most recently valued at $16 billion, doesn’t look or feel like any normal form of communication. Open the app, and you’re confronted by a full-screen viewfinder that looks a lot like your phone’s regular camera app. Mysterious abstract icons hover in corners. Swiping right reveals your messages. This is where committed users send hundreds of selfies a day to their friends, annotating them with emojis or doodles, or applying one of Snapchat’s constantly changing collection of rainbow-vomit-type filters.
Swiping left gets you to the meat of the app: stories. These are short video clips that run in a series and disappear within 24 hours. You, your friends, and people you follow, like DJ Khaled, can post. The upper half of the screen is devoted to variations on stories: the day’s Snapchat-produced Live Stories, as well as Snapchat Discover. There are 20 Snapchat Discover channels, each produced by established media brands such as People, CNN, ESPN, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as up-and-comers such as Vice, BuzzFeed, and Refinery29. Coles’s Cosmo channel is on Discover, as is Sweet, a publication run by the magazine’s parent company, Hearst.
Discover partners generally post 10 or more videos a day on its channels. App users can tap a channel icon to start watching the stream, and tap again to skip to the next clip. Or, if they’re intrigued by a clip, they can swipe up to watch a longer version or read an article. No matter how they tap or swipe, users stay in the app. Links to the Web aren’t allowed. Publishers love not having to compete with a steady stream of links from other publishers, as on Facebook or Twitter, and advertisers love that users actually seem to watch the ads. Since last year, Snapchat has broadened its advertiser base by introducing less-expensive products. Today, buying time on Discover costs $20 per thousand views—more than twice what an ad goes for on Facebook and Instagram. The proceeds are split between Snapchat and its media partners.
Snapchat brand stories
The number of Discover slots is limited—right now it’s just the 20 that fit on one Snapchat screen—and competition among media brands is fierce. In July, Snapchat dropped Yahoo! even though Spiegel had personally recruited Katie Couric, Yahoo’s lead news anchor. BuzzFeed got that slot. Snapchat declines to explain why it bounced Yahoo, but traffic to the channel was reportedly poor. Shortly after replacing Yahoo on Discover, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti disclosed that 21 percent of his company’s overall audience came from Snapchat, a share exceeded only by Facebook and BuzzFeed’s own website and apps.
For less-established companies, getting a Discover slot can be transformative. “That was a dramatic moment in the life of our company,” says Steven Kydd, a co-founder of Tastemade, a four-year-old media startup focused on food and travel videos. Since joining Discover in August, Tastemade has added 20 employees, raised an extra $40 million in venture capital, and reoriented itself around Snapchat. Tastemade started out producing videos primarily for YouTube, then expanded to Facebook, Instagram, and Apple TV. To be eligible for Snapchat’s Discover feature, not only did Tastemade have to produce even more videos, it also needed them to work on a smartphone screen, which is more complicated than it sounds. “This,” Kydd says, pointing at a TV mounted vertically on the wall in Tastemade’s studio in Los Angeles, “is how millennials view content.”
The company built a set, specifically designed for vertical videos, that’s roughly 15 percent skinnier than a standard set and has cameras turned on their sides. Tastemade still has to fill up the other platforms, so it shoots the rest of its videos horizontally on high-resolution cameras, while keeping the action in the middle third of the screen so the footage can also run on Snapchat. TV monitors in the studio are marked with black tape that shows the Snapchat version’s frame. Afterward, segments are edited into multiple cuts: vertical for Snapchat, square for Instagram and Facebook, horizontal for YouTube and Apple TV. “Everything in the industry is designed around landscape video, so to do portrait you kind of have to hack the process,” says Jay Holzer, Tastemade’s head of production.
Days at Tastemade begin with an hourlong story meeting focused on the following day’s Snapchat edition. “Believe it or not, we try to treat this a little bit like a newsroom,” says Oren Katzeff, the programming chief, as a dozen editors and producers sit down in a conference room and open their laptops. The main item on the agenda one February morning is Cookie the News. It’s a series made specifically for Snapchat that uses sped-up video to depict the creation of a current events-themed sweet—for instance, a butter cookie frosted to look like Ziggy Stardust, to commemorate the death of David Bowie. (Cookie the News’s tagline: “Don’t read it. Eat it.”) “We try to cover things that are fun and that can also be turned into a great cookie,” Katzeff says.
The first pitch of the morning focuses on the German shorthaired pointer that just won the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Dogs are cute, everyone agrees. But someone mentions that a giraffe cookie, pegged to the sighting of a rare subspecies in a Tanzanian national park, bombed several weeks earlier. “I think this falls into that category,” another producer says. “Unless we can do something different with the cookie itself.”
“Could you do a dog cookie that the dog could eat?” someone asks, before the idea is mercifully put to sleep.
The group runs through other proposals: cookies of Adele at the Grammys, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the Chinese government’s reported forced resettlement of ethnic minorities, all nixed. Finally, someone mentions a flaw in Apple software that can cause iPhones to “brick,” or be permanently disabled. An iPhone-shaped cookie getting crushed by a brick is approved.
History suggests that cookie-based media, and Snapchat in general, may be a fad. In 2013, several viral video companies thrived, thanks to a knack for being able to rank highly in Facebook’s News Feed by using teasing headlines. For a time, it worked; Upworthy, for example, saw traffic hit nearly 90 million unique users. But Facebook changed its News Feed, consumers tired of the click bait, and traffic sank. “Facebook changed and we adapted,” says Upworthy co-CEO Peter Koechley.
Before he helped start Tastemade, Kydd was an executive vice president of Demand Media, which ran content farms, websites that cranked out posts by the thousands on a daily basis. Posts had little informational value—for instance, “How to Put on a Speedo” was a classic—but they generated huge traffic, and ad revenue, by exploiting a quirk in the way Google handled search queries. The company went public in 2011 and peaked at a valuation of roughly $2 billion—at the time, about 25 percent more than that of the New York Times. Then Google updated its algorithm, and Demand Media’s traffic collapsed. Today its market capitalization is roughly $100 million, and it has a new management team. Kydd notes that Tastemade has always focused on high-quality content.
In late February, Snapchat announced it would provide detailed demographic information about users through Nielsen’s digital ratings service, a welcome development for some advertisers wary of the hype. “Snapchat is awfully expensive, and there’s pretty much a lack of data and visibility,” says Thom Gruhler, a marketing vice president at Microsoft. Another complaint: Meetings with Snapchat executives are rare. “Whether it’s Imran [Khan, Snapchat’s chief strategy officer] or Evan, it’s like getting an audience with the pope,” says an executive at one of the largest ad agencies. With Facebook and Twitter, the big agencies get as many meetings as they want.
Snapchat declined to comment on this critique, but it has informed media buyers that it plans to improve ad targeting and measuring while promising a more hands-on approach. And in February it struck a deal to allow Viacom to sell ads on Snapchat’s behalf. “They’re in the midst of growing up,” says Carrie Seifer, president for digital at Starcom MediaVest Group.
For now, that’s been enough. Advertisers don’t have a lot of good options to reach under-30s. The audiences of CBS, NBC, and ABC are, on average, in their 50s. Cable networks such as CNN and Fox News have it worse, with median viewerships near or past Social Security age. MTV’s median viewers are in their early 20s, but ratings have dropped in recent years. Marketers are understandably anxious, and Spiegel and his deputies have capitalized on those anxieties brilliantly by charging hundreds of thousands of dollars when Snapchat introduces an ad product. OMD’s Winkler calls this a “shrewd strategy” that “instantly elevates the conversation—often to the CMO level,” which means that Snapchat ad buys are often subject to less budgetary scrutiny than normal. “Every CMO’s kid is using it,” says Starcom’s Seifer.
When Snapchat sales reps have called on advertisers, they’ve typically spent more time with creative teams than with media buyers, says David Gaines, chief planning officer at Maxus Global, a media buying agency. “I’ll be honest, I had no idea what they were talking about half the time,” he says of a Snapchat training session he attended. But Gaines is quick to add that he’s a Snapchat believer, because it offers the chance to create ads that look like they belong on a mobile phone, not like miniaturized TV commercials. “The digital producers will come to us and say, ‘Wow, we saw Snapchat this week, and they’re teaching us things we don’t even know about our own jobs,’ ” he says.
“Snapchat is awfully expensive, and there’s pretty much a lack of data and visibility”
In December, Khan traveled to Chicago to meet with executives at PepsiCo’s Gatorade division. Over drinks at Soho House, he proposed a Super Bowl collaboration using a new advertising product inspired by the weird selfie lenses. The result was a video filter that for two days allowed users to send clips that looked like someone was dumping a bucket of orange Gatorade over their heads. Neither Snapchat nor Gatorade would comment on price, but reports put it between $450,000 and $750,000 per day. The videos of virtual drenchings were watched more than 160 million times. “We think it was a fantastic collaboration,” says Kenny Mitchell, who helps lead Gatorade’s new media marketing. He adds that he expects to work more with Snapchat in the coming year.
DJ Khaled, too, hopes to collaborate more closely with Snapchat. In November he became one of the first owners of an Official Stories account, designed to make it slightly easier for Snapchat newbies to find celebrities. Rather than a blue check mark, as on Facebook and Twitter, celebrities get a unique emoji next to their name. Khaled’s, naturally, is a . He also recently pitched Spiegel some ideas for using Snapchat to showcase music, an area where it has struggled.
For now, he’s got the deals with Cîroc and Apple Music, as well as his online clothing store, where you can buy “Major ” T-shirts and flip-flops that say “Bless” on the left foot and “Up” on the right, but he’s trying not to overdo it on paid tie-ins. “When you’re successful, the money chases you,” he says. “You don’t have to chase the money.”
Through the bluster is a hint of anxiety, common enough among moguls and artists, that maybe the magic is fleeting. That’s heightened by the knowledge that everything on Snapchat today will be gone tomorrow. Khaled sometimes saves his best posts. “I don’t save them all,” he says. “Just the classic ones.”