Pop Culture And Snapchat: The Rise Of Snapchat Celebrities

Analyzing Popular Culture

The term ‘popular culture’ carries varying meaning depending on context of use and the person defining it. Generally, popular culture refers to the set of beliefs, principles and objects that comprises the most widely shared meanings of any social system. It refers to the accumulation of various cultural products. These include music, film, cyber culture, fashion, dance and literature. The article provides a description of what popular culture is and clearly outlines the distinction between folk culture and mass culture. Folk culture emanates from a specific community or group. Good examples of folk culture include Appalachian folk music, graffiti done by some street artists and Amish quilts. On the other hand, mass culture is a product of standardized culture such as commercial television and fast food stores and restaurants. Today, we naturally take part in mass culture through our interactions with music, social media, trendy clothes, film, poetry and many other aspects of it. Mass culture has been greatly criticized as materialistic, shallow and mindless. In addition to this, it has been accused of brainwashing children. However, the widespread interaction with popular culture poses a question as to whether it should be taken seriously as an academic discipline.

Snaps to Riches

Hopping onto a new platform remains to be one of the golden rules of marketing. Today Snapchat has risen to become an incredibly popular online platform. The article explains the lucrative opportunities that accrues individuals that are popular on Snapchat. A number of Snapchat celebrities have been approached and used by various multinational corporations to use the platform in marketing the company’s brands. For example, McBride has made huge financial success of the art of Snapchat. In a bid to reach the young demographic, various brands have offered McBride up to $30 000 in advertising deals. These brands include Major League Soccer, Disney, Taco Bell and various television networks. Snapchat has risen to become an effective and convenient brand promoting platform when compared to other social media tools. For instance, not many youths are on Facebook today whereas in Instagram it is very easy for a viewer to scroll past a post. Snapchat covers the undivided attention of its viewers. Moreover, Snapchat allows the user to string together many photos and videos that may last up to two minutes and are made available online for 24 hours. Vine has now become the newer platform. The app, popularly known for short comedy videos, has launched the careers of various stars. This is because brands that were eager to reach the young market gap have granted lucrative advertising deals to Vine stars.

Popular culture may lack the potential of playing a critical role in academics, but it is instrumental in brand promotion. Today, we come in contact with popular culture in many ways. This may be through movies and films, music, paintings and drawings, social media and literature. In as much as we interact with it in many aspects of our lives, it plays a small role in academics. However, certain parts of popular culture are instrumental in helping corporations promote their brand growth. Moving at the speed of popular culture has become imperative for brand success. With regards to accessing a wide audience, popular culture marketing is quite efficient.

Today, popular culture is widely transmitted and harbors the most receptive audience. This is due to the public fascination in social media and the internet. Brands are taking advantage of this by leveraging certain social media celebrities and other cultural phenomena to capture certain market segments. One of the most important premises of branding is the ability to minimize search costs. Snapchat offers this opportunity to all its users. Snapchat is a social media network that has more than 160 million users. Any individual or brand can sends snaps that can be viewed for about 24 hours before they disappear. The app has been made extensively successful among people of young ages. This is attributed to its playful functions, colorful filters, messaging and colorful filters. According to the Snaps to Riches article, Snapchat rose from just a disappearing photo messaging app and started including videos in October last year. One can now post a string of videos and stay live for their followers. This significantly increases the reach of the app. Snapchat has enabled many companies to reach these market segments. For instance, Starbucks currently launched the Snapchat chilled summer drinks campaign. This took campaign of its popular Frappuccino and granted its drinkers the opportunity to place a festive lens over images of their beverages and post it on Snapchat. Evidenced by the increase in sales, this campaign encouraged other Snapchat users to find the nearest Starbucks for the cold drink. In addition to this, Starbucks gained many more followers on the platform, increasing the odds of sales increase. Many companies have opted to use Snapchat celebrities to build the awareness of their brands. This is mostly effective when individuals with many followers are used. An example of Snapchat personalities that have been used to get to the hard-to-reach young market segment is McBride. Popularly known as Shonduras, was approached by Disney. Due to his large number of followers, the brand hired him to run their Snapchat account for 24 hours. A subsequent deal to capture the frozen story was offered. In addition to this, he has used his account to brand the Major League Soccer brand and has been consulted by other corporations on how they can boost their online presence.