{"id":114,"date":"2016-03-04T09:03:18","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T14:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/?p=114"},"modified":"2016-03-04T09:03:18","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T14:03:18","slug":"read-this-article-and-write-a-12-page-sumary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/2016\/03\/04\/read-this-article-and-write-a-12-page-sumary\/","title":{"rendered":"Read this article and write a 1\/2 page sumary"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a Wednesday\u00a0in 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. \u201cGood morning,\u201d he said to no one in particular. \u201cBless up.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Snapchat photo filters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

DJ Khaled, as he\u2019s 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\u2019s top FM stations. The rap on Khaled was that he could attract talented collaborators but wasn\u2019t much of a musician himself. \u201cMostly, he just incessantly screams dumb catchphrases,\u201d one Pitchfork reviewer complained. \u201cAnd he doesn\u2019t even do that particularly well.\u201d This sort of thing weighed on Khaled. The critics, the haters, the people who\u2019ve ignored his career\u2014they didn\u2019t want him to be in such a beautiful garden.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love my angels,\u201d 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\u2019s journey. Khaled sees metaphors everywhere, actually, which is a major key\u2014or as he prefers to type it out, \u201cmajor \"key\u201d\u2014to his success on Snapchat, the social network where he has amassed some 6\u00a0million followers since last October. \u201cLife is like flowers,\u201d he observed, training his iPhone camera at the ground and holding down the record button. \u201cYou grow. You blossom. You become great.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

If you want to understand Snapchat, the insanely fast-growing and\u2014to people born before 1990\u2014straight-up insane messaging app and media platform, DJ Khaled is your Virgil. If you were one of the 100\u00a0million 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. \u201cRide wit me through the journey [to] more success,\u201d he captioned that last video, as his chauffeur pedaled furiously.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI didn\u2019t really know how to use it,\u201d he says on a recent afternoon in Los Angeles. \u201cI was kind of just talking to myself.\u201d 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 (\u201cThe key to more success is to have a lot of pillows\u201d) and regular meals (\u201cThey don\u2019t want you to eat breakfast\u201d). His most dramatic Snapchat moment occurred during a twilight ride on a personal watercraft in Biscayne Bay. \u201cThe key is to make it,\u201d he repeated as he got lost on the water. Then he turned the camera on himself and added, \u201cThe key is not to drive your Jet Ski in the dark.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khaled made it, and since that fateful night he\u2019s been pretty much the hottest ticket in media\u2014the guy who\u2019s figured out the digital property everyone wants a piece of but no one quite understands. He\u2019s palled around with Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, created Snapchat videos on behalf of C\u00eeroc vodka, and signed a deal to host a weekly radio show on Apple Music\u2019s flagship station, Beats\u00a01. His catchphrases have occasioned explainers from otherwise serious news organizations, including Time<\/em>, Quartz, and\u2013\"key\u2013Bloomberg Businessweek<\/em>. \u201cDJ Khaled has completely cracked the platform,\u201d says Emmanuel Seuge, senior vice president for content at Coca-Cola, one of Snapchat\u2019s major advertisers. \u201cHe\u2019s the king of Snapchat.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe vast majority of people reading this article will have a Snapchat account within 36 months\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Compared with Twitter or Facebook, Snapchat can seem almost aggressively user-unfriendly. If you\u2019re new to the app and looking for posts by your kid, your boyfriend, or DJ Khaled, good luck. It\u2019s hard to find somebody without knowing his or her screen name. This is by design. \u201cWe\u2019ve made it very hard for parents to embarrass their children,\u201d Spiegel said at a conference in January. \u201cIt\u2019s much more for sharing personal moments than it is about this public display.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spiegel, who declined to be interviewed, has been cagey about Snapchat\u2019s business prospects. Its annual revenue is small\u2014perhaps $200 million, according to several press reports\u2014but 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\u2019s 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\u2019s and Facebook\u2019s customer base, there\u2019s a lot of potential.<\/p>\n

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Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek<\/em>, Mar. 7, 2016.Subscribe now.<\/a><\/figcaption>
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Photographer: Julian Berman for Bloomberg Businessweek<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

As Facebook has transformed from a slightly wild place to a communications tool for parents, teachers, and heads of state, Snapchat\u2019s more playful ethos, and the fact that anything posted on it disappears in 24 hours, has made it the looser, goofier social network. \u201cYou\u2019re sending this ephemera back and forth to your friends,\u201d says Charlie McKittrick, the head of strategy at Mother New York, an ad agency. \u201cIt\u2019s the detritus of life. But it\u2019s really funny.\u201d Last September, while Mark Zuckerberg hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook\u2019s campus, the big news at Snapchat\u2019s offices in Venice was a feature called Lenses, which makes your selfies look like you\u2019re vomiting a rainbow.<\/p>\n

Snapchat is just the sort of place where DJ Khaled, in his uninhibited glory, could find an audience. Vice called his Jet Ski adventure \u201cthe greatest sitcom episode ever filmed.\u201d Elite Daily, the \u201cvoice of Generation\u00a0Y\u201d news site, raved, \u201cIf You\u2019re Not Following DJ Khaled On Snapchat Already, You\u2019re Buggin\u2019.\u201d In December, Khaled posted to Snapchat while getting his iPhone fixed at an Apple Store. Soon he was surrounded by fans. \u201cIt was unreal,\u201d he says. \u201cMy Snapchat has more viewers than any TV show.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an exaggeration, but not by much. Khaled\u2019s videos attract 3\u00a0million to 4\u00a0million viewers each. Given how\u00a0Snapchat 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\u00a0The Big Bang Theory<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Even bigger than the videos posted by Khaled and Kylie Jenner\u2014the platform\u2019s other big star, with 10\u00a0million followers\u2014are Snapchat\u2019s own Live Stories. These are mashups of news events culled from the feeds of Snapchat users and produced by the company\u2019s 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\u2014for instance, New York\u2019s 2015 Snowmageddon and the Coachella music festival\u2014can 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\u00a0billion 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\u00a0percent of adults in the U.S. under 35 spend time on Snapchat.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody from 14 to 24 in America, it\u2019s either the No.\u00a01 or No.\u00a02 app in their lives,\u201d after Instagram, says Gary Vaynerchuk, an angel investor and entrepreneur. Actually, it\u2019s 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. \u201cThe vast majority of people reading this article will have a Snapchat account within 36 months,\u201d he says. \u201cEven if, as they\u2019re reading this, they don\u2019t believe me.\u201d<\/p>\n

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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. \u201cThe people\u2019s champ of smartphone peep shows,\u201d this magazine put it in 2013. When Spiegel turned down a reported $3\u00a0billion buyout offer by Facebook, the then 23-year-old was mocked in the press and even by members of his own board. \u201cIf you knew the real number\u201d 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, \u201cyou would book us all a suite at Bellevue,\u201d the New York hospital with the famous psychiatric ward.<\/p>\n

In late 2014, when Spiegel unveiled the company\u2019s business plan\u2014for 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\u2014he was again derided for being out of touch. \u201cIt\u2019s like how the Kardashians are famous because they\u2019re famous,\u201d says Ben Winkler, the chief investment officer for the media buying firm OMD. \u201cSnapchat is expensive because it\u2019s expensive.\u201d Of course, that\u2019s another way of saying it\u2019s expensive because lots of people want to buy it. \u201cAlmost every editor has put me in a chokehold to find out how they can get on the platform,\u201d says Joanna Coles, the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan<\/em>, and since December a Snapchat board member.<\/p>\n

Snapchat, which was most recently valued at $16\u00a0billion, doesn\u2019t look or feel like any normal form of communication. Open the app, and you\u2019re confronted by a full-screen viewfinder that looks a lot like your phone\u2019s 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\u2019s constantly changing collection of rainbow-vomit-type filters.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0hours. 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\u2019s Snapchat-produced Live Stories, as well as Snapchat Discover. There are 20 Snapchat Discover channels, each produced by established media brands such as People<\/em><\/a>, CNN, ESPN, and the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, as well as up-and-comers such as Vice, BuzzFeed, and Refinery29. Coles\u2019s Cosmo channel is on Discover, as is Sweet, a publication run by the magazine\u2019s parent company, Hearst.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re 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\u2019t 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\u2014more than twice what an ad goes for on Facebook and Instagram. The proceeds are split between Snapchat and its media partners.<\/p>\n

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Snapchat brand stories<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The number of Discover slots is limited\u2014right now it\u2019s just the 20 that fit on one Snapchat screen\u2014and competition among media brands is fierce. In July, Snapchat dropped Yahoo! even though Spiegel had personally recruited Katie Couric, Yahoo\u2019s 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\u00a0percent of his company\u2019s overall audience came from Snapchat, a share exceeded only by Facebook and BuzzFeed\u2019s own website and apps.<\/p>\n

For less-established companies, getting a Discover slot can be transformative. \u201cThat was a dramatic moment in the life of our company,\u201d 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\u00a0million 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\u2019s 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. \u201cThis,\u201d Kydd says, pointing at a TV mounted vertically on the wall in Tastemade\u2019s studio in Los Angeles, \u201cis how millennials view content.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company built a set, specifically designed for vertical videos, that\u2019s roughly 15\u00a0percent 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\u2019s frame. Afterward, segments are edited into multiple cuts: vertical for Snapchat, square for Instagram and Facebook, horizontal for YouTube and Apple TV. \u201cEverything in the industry is designed around landscape video, so to do portrait you kind of have to hack the process,\u201d says Jay Holzer, Tastemade\u2019s head of production.<\/p>\n

Days at Tastemade begin with an hourlong story meeting focused on the following day\u2019s Snapchat edition. \u201cBelieve it or not, we try to treat this a little bit like a newsroom,\u201d 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\u2019s a series made specifically for Snapchat that uses sped-up video to depict the creation of a current events-themed sweet\u2014for instance, a butter cookie frosted to look like Ziggy Stardust, to commemorate the death of David Bowie. (Cookie the News\u2019s tagline: \u201cDon\u2019t read it. Eat it.\u201d) \u201cWe try to cover things that are fun and that can also be turned into a great cookie,\u201d Katzeff says.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI think this falls into that category,\u201d another producer says. \u201cUnless we can do something different with the cookie itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCould you do a dog cookie that the dog could eat?\u201d someone asks, before the idea is mercifully put to sleep.<\/p>\n

The group runs through other proposals: cookies of Adele at the Grammys, the Sports Illustrated<\/em> swimsuit issue, the Chinese government\u2019s reported forced resettlement of ethnic minorities, all nixed. Finally, someone mentions a flaw in Apple software that can cause iPhones to \u201cbrick,\u201d or be permanently disabled. An iPhone-shaped cookie getting crushed by a brick is approved.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s News Feed by using teasing headlines. For a time, it worked; Upworthy, for example, saw traffic hit nearly 90\u00a0million unique users. But Facebook changed its News Feed, consumers tired of the click bait, and traffic sank. \u201cFacebook changed and we adapted,\u201d says Upworthy co-CEO Peter Koechley.<\/p>\n

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\u2014for instance, \u201cHow to Put on a Speedo\u201d was a classic\u2014but 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\u00a0billion\u2014at the time, about 25\u00a0percent more than that of the New York Times<\/em>. Then Google updated its algorithm, and Demand Media\u2019s traffic collapsed. Today its market capitalization is roughly\u00a0$100\u00a0million, and it has a new management team. Kydd notes that Tastemade has always focused on high-quality content.<\/p>\n

In late February, Snapchat announced it would provide detailed demographic information about users through Nielsen\u2019s digital ratings service, a welcome development for some advertisers wary of the hype. \u201cSnapchat is awfully expensive, and there\u2019s pretty much a lack of data and visibility,\u201d says Thom Gruhler, a marketing vice president at Microsoft. Another complaint: Meetings with Snapchat executives are rare. \u201cWhether it\u2019s Imran [Khan, Snapchat\u2019s chief strategy officer] or Evan, it\u2019s like getting an audience with the pope,\u201d says an executive at one of the largest ad agencies. With Facebook and Twitter, the big agencies get as many meetings as they want.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s behalf. \u201cThey\u2019re in the midst of growing up,\u201d says Carrie Seifer, president for digital at Starcom MediaVest Group.<\/p>\n

For now, that\u2019s been enough. Advertisers don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Winkler calls this a \u201cshrewd strategy\u201d that \u201cinstantly elevates the conversation\u2014often to the CMO level,\u201d which means that Snapchat ad buys are often subject to less budgetary scrutiny than normal. \u201cEvery CMO\u2019s kid is using it,\u201d says Starcom\u2019s Seifer.<\/p>\n

When Snapchat sales reps have called on advertisers, they\u2019ve typically spent more time with creative teams than with media buyers, says David Gaines, chief planning officer at Maxus Global, a media buying agency. \u201cI\u2019ll be honest, I had no idea what they were talking about half the time,\u201d he says\u00a0of a Snapchat training session he attended. But Gaines is quick to add that he\u2019s 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. \u201cThe digital producers will come to us and say, \u2018Wow, we saw Snapchat this week, and they\u2019re teaching us things we don\u2019t even know about our own jobs,\u2019\u2009\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cSnapchat is awfully expensive, and there\u2019s pretty much a lack of data and visibility\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In December, Khan traveled to Chicago to meet with executives at PepsiCo\u2019s 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\u00a0million times. \u201cWe think it was a fantastic collaboration,\u201d says Kenny Mitchell, who helps lead Gatorade\u2019s new media marketing. He adds that he expects to work more with Snapchat in the coming year.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s, naturally, is a \"key. He also recently pitched Spiegel some ideas for using Snapchat to showcase music, an area where it has struggled.<\/p>\n

For now, he\u2019s got the deals with C\u00eeroc and Apple Music, as well as his online clothing store, where you can buy \u201cMajor \"key\u201d T-shirts and flip-flops that say \u201cBless\u201d on the left foot and \u201cUp\u201d on the right, but he\u2019s trying not to overdo it on paid tie-ins. \u201cWhen you\u2019re successful, the money chases you,\u201d he says. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to chase the money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through the bluster is a hint of anxiety, common enough among moguls and artists, that maybe the magic is fleeting. That\u2019s heightened by the knowledge that everything on Snapchat today will be gone tomorrow. Khaled sometimes saves his best posts. \u201cI don\u2019t save them all,\u201d he says. \u201cJust the classic ones.\u201d \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a Wednesday\u00a0in 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1549,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1549"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/teetsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}