Snapchat Commerce: Swipe to Buy & Adverbs

This is an excerpt from a much more in depth post about business messaging. The post was designed and written in collaboration with Jonathan Lieberman.

“Swipe to Buy” (On Snapchat)

Snapchat is dominating the advertising and content world on social. The impressions and ad dollars are there, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What if Snapchat started bringing on brands and businesses that allowed you to do more than just consume content?

We want brands to have a place where they can tell their stories … in a better way.

— Imran Khan, Snapchat’s Chief Strategy Officer

We believe brands can do way more than just tell their stories.

Gatorade’s Super Bowl campaign garnered more than 165 million views on Snapchat and produced an 8-Point Jump in purchase intent.

What if that intent could be realized? What if customers could seamlessly talk and transact with their favorite brands or businesses?

Below is a demonstration of how a consumer could go beyond content consumption and transact on Snapchat. We call it “Swipe to Buy.”

This has the makings of a better way to do business, not just a better way to sell ads. This has the potential to change Snapchat’s business model from a pure advertising play.

Adverbs, Yes Adverbs

I’ve always wondered when the day would come that a product or feature might be able to dethrone Search. Adwords is a massive business. Google rakes in 33% of all online ad revenue. That’s $38.6 billion out of $177.6 billion. Their share of US paid search ad spend is a whopping 82%.

And “Adverbs” could be bigger. (Yes, we made up Adverbs.)

Messaging has way more data flying through it than Google’s search box.These platforms are ingesting, indexing and analyzing an incredible amount of contextually relevant content.

What if these platforms could bring me the right service at the right time while chatting with friends?

Imagine you are chatting with a friend about buying flowers for your wife. That within that conversation the ability to purchase flowers presents itself.Conveniently placed so you don’t need to leave the conversation to take action. Never annoying, there only if you want it.

Platforms would need to set a high bar for gaining this type of access. Brands could bid on verbs that would show up just like Adwords but inmessage threads.

Google could stand to lose significant search dollars if they don’t play in the messaging space.

Social is shifting from likes 👍 and hearts ❤️ → dollars 💵 and service 🎩.Social metrics are about to undergo a massive change.