Brief:
- Kylie Jenner, the reality-TV star with 96.3 million followers on Instagram, will host a Snapchat show produced by the E! Network that promises to show a peek into her personal and professional life. "Ask Kylie" will debut on Snapchat Discover on August 12 with five more episodes each week as a lead-in to her reality show "Life of Kylie" on E!, Variety reported. "Life of Kylie" debuts on August 6 at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Time.
- The 19-year-old celebrity will respond on Snapchat to fan questions about family drama, navigating heartbreak, handling stress and starting her cosmetics line, among other topics. Some of her friends also will appear in the series, including sister Khloé Kardashian, best friend Jordyn Woods, executive assistant Victoria Villaroel and grandmother MJ.
- E! Online is also promoting a faux PSA ad featuring Jenner educating millennials on what TV is so they can watch her show.
Insight:
Celebrity news and visual platforms like Snapchat and Instagram are proving to be a good pairing. E! also produces "The Rundown," one of the first Snapchat Shows, which has averaged about 8 million viewers, most of whom are ages 13-24. Snapchat has 166 million users. NBCUniversal, which invested $500 million in Snap when the social-media company went public in March, owns E!.
Snap, the parent company of Snapchat whose stock fell to new lows this week, wants to find more ways to monetize its mostly millennial audience as the company faces a growing threat from Facebook's Instagram. Instagram Stories, a feature that mimics Snapchat Stories for collections of photos and videos, now has 250 million daily users, exceeding Snapchat's 166 million.
The "Ask Kylie" show is another addition to Snapchat Discovery's line-up from an NBCUniversal property. NBC News last month debuted "Stay Tuned," a twice-daily program anchored by the news outlet's Gadi Schwartz and MSNBC reporter Savannah Sellers. The show covers news, politics and pop culture among other topics.
Another threat from Instagram is its offers of free trials and credits to marketers, mostly while rolling out new ad units or tools it wants brands to test, Business Insider reported. The incentives vary among brands and media agencies, including a retail client that tested ads of various lengths last month in Instagram Stories at no charge. Advertisers also are seeing a lower return on investment on Snapchat than on rival platforms, according to Morgan Stanley, which likely leads to fewer advertisers running to snag space on the platform. Snapchat has also been slower to roll out an automated bidding platform for brands that want to place ads on the app. Morgan Stanley's Brian Nowak forecast that the technology won't be fully operational until the end of 2017 or early 2018.
Morgan Stanley in July listed several reasons for disappointment in Snap, starting with poor ad completion rates. Once upon a time, Snapchat was appealing for marketers that wanted to place their ads between user-generated content, making those ads feel more personal to users than other social media platforms. Snap also promised access to the millennial consumer bracket that's steadily shunning traditional media like TV, but completion rates have been lower than expected, Morgan Stanley said, making advertisers turn to Instagram and Facebook for higher completion rates.
The biggest drop in TV viewing last year was among teenagers, a key audience for Snapchat. They watched 13 hours and 54 minutes of traditional TV a week in Q4 2016, an 11% decline from the year before and a 38% drop from five years ago, according to data by Nielsen. As broadcast TV struggles to find its next generation of loyal viewers, several major mobile-first companies like Snapchat are leveraging this shift in TV viewing and trying to harness younger audiences by experimenting with original programming.