Sociable: Snapchat tries to teach brands to be funny

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The app released guidance on how marketers can connect with younger users through humor and offered tips on effective comedy writing.

“Sociable” is the latest commentary on important social media developments and trends from industry expert Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today.

Snapchat published a new report that looks at how younger audiences connect through humor, and examines the value of using comedy in marketing promotions.

Humor is a universal connector and has always been one of the most powerful drivers of engagement across all age groups.

However, this study specifically examines what qualifies as humor among younger audience subsets.

As Snapchat said: “What’s 67? What’s aura farming? What’s unc? To the older generations, young people’s humor can feel difficult to decode. Yet beneath the memes, inside jokes, and absurd internet trends is something much bigger: a generation using humor as one of its primary social languages.”

To dig deeper into what young people find funny, Snapchat partnered with Omnicom to survey more than 6,000 social media users aged between 13 and 28 from the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany and India.

The report attempts to provide more context around what young people will respond to, and how brands can use that in their outreach efforts.

The report examines how young audiences connect around humorous content.

Response data showed that young audiences were keen to see brands lean into humor in their promotions.

However, such attempts often fall flat.

To help with this, Snapchat tried to contextualize what’s funny in the eyes of younger audiences in an attempt to inform content approaches.

The report tries to provide a basic structure for comedy writing, in order to provide guidance for marketers looking to connect with young audiences.

This may be the first time that a social platform has sought to break down the mechanics of being funny, and creating comedic content that appeals to a certain audience.

The challenge here is that being creative, and writing engaging, humorous content, can’t be commodified to this degree. Brands need a level of audience understanding and marketers need to have a natural ability and some self-awareness to pull off a truly resonant comedy idea. Simply put, Snapchat can’t teach a brand to be funny.

But maybe, with these notes, more marketers can lean into the latest comedic trends and behaviors, and create campaigns that better align with what younger users will respond to.

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Ten-figure acquisitions, new agency experiments and organizational changes are underway, but the real key may be relinquishing a sense of control.

The sense of a stable middle ground is eroding across an industry at a point of contraction, with many displaying mixed feelings about marketing s future.

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