App: Snapchat
Ad: TikTok
Targeted: No
Snapchat is a weird social media app because I don't actually use it as a social media app at all. The only reason I keep it on my phone is because it has the best filters for those rare times when I want to take a selfie - they're cuter than what Instagram has to offer, so usually I'll take a photo with Snapchat and then upload it to my Insta story. I do have a few friends added on there but it's been a long time since I sent a snap or looked at their stories, until today.
Safiya has done a Snapchat ad experiment video before and she looked in a few different places for ads, so I replicated that search. The first place I looked was in my friends' stories, where I'd expect to see an ad interspersed between them. However, I've only got 2 friends on Snapchat who are still posting stories - I saw one baby picture and a few night out selfies - which apparently isn't enough to insert an ad into, so I was out of luck. Next I went to the filters available when taking a photo, as you often get sponsored filters that are either app-wide or specific to your local area, but today there was no option for a sponsored selfie and I also got nothing at all when it came to post-photo filters, since I live in a place that's apparently so remote that there isn't even a filter to announce where the picture was taken.
The final place to look was the 'Discover' section, which is where news and lifestyle sites post interactive stories which include things like celebrity gossip, funny videos, quizzes and beauty tips. For some reason, a lot of the Discover stories wouldn't play on my phone. The one at the top of the page was from Allure magazine and featured K-Pop band NCT 127, but all I got was freeze-frames of the start of each section of video and as a result I didn't get to see ads either. The first one that worked was a story by 'Brother' which I can only assume is an online publication - I've never heard of it, and I don't think it was the printer company which comes up when I try to Google them - and the story was a guessing game where you got 12 clues and had to guess what item they were describing (spoiler: the answer was condoms and I got there after 3 or 4 clues). The first ad appeared after a couple of clues, and consisted of a short video of a man saying something like "this is how you talk to girls in Wales" followed by him running up to a herd of cows and yelling in their direction. I knew it was an ad because it says "AD" in the corner, but there was no branding anywhere on the video itself so I had to swipe up to find out what it was for. It turns out they were advertising another social media app - TikTok.
I know that TikTok is an app for posting short clips that originated as a place to share lip-synching videos, but has grown into one of the most popular apps among Generation Z. It's in the news today because the US Military have banned it from government phones since it's owned by China. I've never downloaded the app as I usually find this sort of content excruciating, but I have seen TikTok clips online before because they're unavoidable to a young person who uses the internet, and obviously I've heard Old Town Road plenty of times. Since I have 0 storage space on my phone for new apps, I downloaded it on my tablet to check it out properly and see whether maybe I was wrong about it. After all, it has apparently been downloaded from Google Play over 500 million times.
After downloading the app, it asked me to choose my interests from a list of around 20 categories, including comedy, animals, sports and food. I ticked 9 of them and that was it - the next button was 'start watching'. So that's what I did. The 'Home' page started showing me clips that I assumed were linked to the interests I'd picked until I realised they were showing me clips about football and I definitely didn't pick 'sports'. Almost everything I saw aside from that was teenagers messing around, posing and falling over and performing. I tested out the search function by looking up "egirl" which I understood to be a fashion culture originating on apps like TikTok that used over-the-top makeup in opposition to the mainstream Kardashian look and an updated version of Tumblr's 'pastel goth' style. What I actually found was videos of teenage girls dancing seductively and miming along to spoken audio clips, and they weren't nearly as subversive as I'd expected.
I gather that you can't speak in a TikTok video and have to pick a snippet of music to play over your images and as a result, the videos mainly fall into three camps. There's the ones where people are seen lip-synching, usually not to music but to obscure spoken word clips that I didn't recognise at all. There are ones where people have uploaded their own soundtrack - usually a song they've written or are performing to show off their singing talent. But overwhelmingly, the soundtrack is that soft mumbled SoundCloud rap/R&B music that has probably been given a specific genre label by now but I don't know what it is. The only recognisable song I came across was Dance Monkey by Tones & I which was at the top of the singles chart for a little while at the end of last year, and now I wonder whether TikTok was the place where it started to gain a following. The other thing I noticed that it had verified users, marked with the same blue tick that Twitter uses. I recognised Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Chelsea FC, neither of whom are 'TikTok celebrities', but most of the verified users were teens I've never seen or heard of. It's interesting that it seems to have its own circle of influencers that haven't spread out into the mainstream media, as far as I can tell.
I don't think this advert was targeted towards me, considering how little I use Snapchat. I can't name any 'influencers' who are/were on there aside from Kylie Jenner, who famously said that she'd grown tired of the app and caused its stocks to plummet as a result, so I don't know how it would gauge my interests aside from their 'Discover' page. I carried on looking for ads throughout the day to see what else Snapchat would offer me, and more often than not it was other apps that they encouraged me to download. I had a quick look and it appears that Snapchat and TikTok are not owned by the same people so I wonder what the deal is there - it's a bit like YouTube sending me to Bing yesterday. I was prepared for TikTok to show me some ads as the Google Play Store warned that the app contained them but I didn't see a single clip that appeared to be sponsored - it would have been interesting to see an ad for Snapchat there.
I don't want to sound like an old person who looks down on the media choices of the generation that come after me, but I don't 'get' TikTok. I've never been into watching people's homemade video clips, even when it was a YouTube thing or even a You've Been Framed thing, so it doesn't really serve any purpose for me. I'm glad I looked at it because I understand it a little better, but I won't be keeping it on my device.
If you want to check it out for yourself, they have a website as well as an app: https://www.tiktok.com/en/
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