What is Snapchat? An app where friends can communicate and post photos and videos to stories that disappear within 24 hours.

Sounds like a social media platform, right? Wrong, at least according to the company’s newest brand campaign.

That message is front and center in Snapchat’s “Less social media. More Snapchat” campaign, which began rolling out in February. Despite boasting many features common to social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Snap executives are insistent on the app’s distinctness.

“It was built during the dawn of social media, but I think it was always designed to be an alternative to it,” Jerico Cabaysa, director of brand management and operations at Snap, told Marketing Brew. “We wanted to make sure that it was clear to the world who we are and how important we are to the people who are big fans of Snapchat.”

There are some key differences between Snapchat and platforms traditionally considered to be social media: Messages on the platform automatically delete after 24 hours, and instead of opening to a rolling timeline like Instagram and TikTok do, the app opens to a camera.

As public opinion on social media shifts—32% of teens said “social media has had a mostly negative effect on people their age,” according to a 2023 study from the Pew Research Center—Snapchat’s campaign represents a calculated effort to separate itself.

“We’re not saying, ‘end social media’; we’re saying, ‘[use] less of it,’” Cabaysa said. “This is what you will experience on Snapchat, and more of that is better for you, and probably for the greater good of how you feel.”

Continue reading here.—JN

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Podcast ad revenue growth slowed for the second year in a row in 2023, but it’s on track to cross the $2 billion mark this year, according to the IAB’s annual US Podcast Advertising Revenue Study.

The IAB, which hosted its podcast upfront last week, largely attributed the slowdown to “a challenging advertising climate that particularly affected mid-tier companies.” A few of the biggest podcasting companies saw double-digit growth, according to the report, but collectively, last year marked the industry’s first year of single-digit growth since at least 2015.

Off year: Podcast ad revenue reached $1.9 billion in the US in 2023, per the IAB. That’s up 5% from $1.8 billion in 2022, a significantly slower growth rate than the industry has seen in recent years.

• From 2021 to 2022, podcast ad revenue jumped by 26%.
• From 2020 to 2021, it shot up by 72% to cross the $1 billion milestone.

Podcast ad revenue growth was outpaced by overall digital ad revenue growth last year, another change from 2022, when podcasting showed stronger growth than digital. But single-digit growth could continue to be an outlier: The IAB predicts that this year will mark a return to double-digit growth, with revenue on track to more than double its growth rate from 5% to 12%, pushing the industry beyond $2 billion in ad revenue. The industry had previously been on track to hit that number in 2022, according to the IAB.

Keep reading here.—AM

You’ve just spent millions of dollars, countless computing hours, and untold gallons of cool water steeping a neural network in the sum of internet knowledge. Now, just one question remains: What do you call this thing?

That’s where David Placek and his naming agency, Lexicon Branding, might come in. If you don’t know the agency’s own name, you definitely know some of the names it’s coined: Febreze, Dasani, BlackBerry, Sonos, the Subaru Outback.

Situated in the houseboat haven of Sausalito, California, the small agency has worked with most of the tech giants jostling over AI supremacy on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. And lately, Placek has been spending a lot of time thinking about what to call various chatbots.

After “numerous requests from companies to name new AI technology brands,” Lexicon recently polled around 350 consumers and developers in the US and Germany to try to understand what makes a good moniker for this new wave of generative AI models.

Based on the findings, Placek might encourage clients to use something that brings to mind a piece of the natural world, like Meta’s Llama models, as a way to “convey a sense of simplicity, calm, and ease,” according to the report. Words that are “relatable” and “capable,” and include a commonly used suffix or prefix, like Co-, as in Microsoft Copilot or Cohere, can connote “collaboration, competence, and a sense of being in control,” the findings suggest.

Read more on Tech Brew.—PK

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