Dive Brief:
- Snapchat is actively pitching 2016 political campaigns for some of the millions being spent in ad dollars.
- The pitch has a compelling element in access to Snapchat’s millions of millennial users, two-thirds of which are potential voters.
- A recent survey found one-third of likely-to-vote millennials use the app.
Dive Insight:
Election year campaigns come with a lot of politicking and ever larger bags of money to spend on advertising. Snapchat wants some of that cash and has a solid campaign pitch of its own to entice candidates to spend some of their ad money on the platform – the ephemeral messaging app's millions-strong millennial user base.
Rob Saliterman, head of political ad sales for Snapchat, told Politico, “Younger people are not only on Snapchat but young people who are on Snapchat are interested in the election, are engaged in politics and have a high likelihood to vote.”
One part of Snapchat’s campaign to lure political ad revenue is continuous “live stories” in the two leading states once the nominating process begins, Iowa and New Hampshire. And it has an inside ringer, Peter Hamby, the head of its in-house news group, who was a political reporter for CNN before joining Snapchat.
Most of the major 2016 presidential candidates are already using the app, if not spending any ad dollars on the platform yet. Donald Trump, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush are the current Snapchat holdouts.
