Technology & IT | Tuesday 30 July, 2019 12:18 pm |

Timed to coincide with the United Nation’s International Day of Friendship on July 30, Snapchat has launched its first global paid-media campaign designed to elevate the power of friendship and celebrate real-life friendships on its platform.

The campaign was developed in-house by Snap Inc.’s internal creative team. The goal was simple: to put a spotlight on the value and importance of the people who love you exactly the way you are. Featuring over 70 real Snapchatters from 12 different countries, “Real Friends” explores all the various shapes and sizes real friendship can take.

Snapchat worked closely with its creative and production partner SpecialGuest, a communications and arts company based out of Brooklyn, New York, to develop and produce the video creative for the “Real Friends” campaign.

Kenny Mitchell, CMO at Snap Inc., noted: “Snapchat is for real friends, so today we’re launching a celebration of the friends who share, laugh, love and connect with each other using our platform. Featuring more than 70 Snapchatters from 12 different countries, ‘Real friends’ shares the stories behind real friendships around the world.”

The campaign follows a global study commissioned by Snapchat and released this summer to explore how culture, age, and technology shape preferences and attitudes around friendship. The research showed that friendship is hugely important to happiness. People in India, the Middle East and South East Asia reported having three times the number of best friends as those in Australia, Europe and the U.S. The study also found that Snapchat users have the highest numbers of ‘best’ and ‘close’ friends when compared to users of public social media platforms.

Not long after the study was released, Snapchat announced that it saw a 13 million increase in Daily Active Users in Q2 2019, with an average of 203 million daily users of Snapchat. The average number of Snaps created every day also grew to more than 3.5 billion this past quarter, with the average time spent per user over 30 minutes per day.