French social media app BeReal has exploded in popularity this year, hitting the No. 1 spot in the Apple app store’s chart of free social networking apps. TikTok and Instagram have also said they’re working on features that copy BeReal’s model.
When a social media app takes off, brands often want in on the trend. Writing on Input, tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker explained why brand marketing is particularly challenging on BeReal. He spoke about it with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: Give me the 30-second BeReal primer for those who are not, perhaps, familiar, would you?
Chris Stokel-Walker: So BeReal is an app that will send you a push notification the same way that you do through news apps or anything else. And it tells you basically, grab your cellphone, and two pictures are taken. One, using your front-facing camera. The other looking at your regular-facing camera, the one that looks out into the world. The idea is that you capture a moment in time that then gets shared with your friends and gives them a little bit of an insight, maybe unfiltered, into your everyday life.
Ryssdal: OK. Now tell me how the social media team from Chipotle wound up in [New York’s] Times Square one day hanging around waiting for that notification.
Stokel-Walker: Yeah, so BeReal is becoming rapidly a phenomenon of social media. Forty-one million times it’s been downloaded this year alone. And Chipotle, who are known for being at the forefront of lots of social media movements, they had a billboard up on Times Square. They then decided that they were going to record it through BeReal. So they sent a bunch of their marketing team down to Times Square to mill about until they got that notification. Then, lo and behold, they take the picture, they upload it to BeReal, it becomes a social media movement.
Ryssdal: I am surely not the first person to observe the irony of a large corporation putting advertising on an app that is all about being real.
Stokel-Walker: Indeed, and I think that is one of the fundamental issues with BeReal is essentially, capitalism ruins everything, right? We have this idea that there are these really unique, fantastic apps which have, in the case of BeReal, a response to the highly polished Instagram aesthetic. Then suddenly, you have these brands who realize that they’re missing out on a cultural moment. They decide to hop on board, and they bring in the sort of polish that comes with all of the marketing messages that we see on subways.
Ryssdal: And it is the job of some probably entry-levelish, junior social media person to stand around in Times Square, just for instance, to make this happen, right?
Stokel-Walker: Yeah. I spoke to Chipotle and tried to speak to a few other organizations that have leapt on to BeReal and ask them how they actually do this. Do they just have someone sat around with all the props for the latest BeReal post? And they were a little bit cagey about the secret behind the magic.
Ryssdal: Well, the secret behind the magic is get some junior person to stand around all day, and you don’t pay them very much. And that’s the return on investment. Right?
Stokel-Walker: It is. And one of the interesting things about the return on investment is that there isn’t really that much. This is kind of virtue signaling at the minute. This is an attempt to try and get what’s called earned media from this.
Ryssdal: Well, so, on the whole making-the-investment thing. What’s your sense of the calculation companies are making on getting into, say, BeReal, which, for all its 41 million downloads, is still really new. And how do companies know whether it’s going to be Instagram and, you know, crazily popular, or like Clubhouse, which was a flash in the pan, but now is what? You know?
Stokel-Walker: Yeah. I think that they don’t, in short. This is one of the issues with marketing on BeReal. It requires a lot of time and effort and investment because you have to pay these people. It means that you end up having these big brands like Chipotle taking that risk because they know that ultimately, as a percentage of their overall marketing budget, it’s going to be relatively small. And if it doesn’t pay off, then so be it. But for those smaller companies, there is this risk that they lose out because budgets are being tight everywhere.
Ryssdal: I am not, to be clear, on BeReal. I’ve got time for one social media network in my life, and that’s it. I mean, this is your job, are you on BeReal?
Stokel-Walker: I’m not. I downloaded it. One of the issues that I have is that I dropped my cellphone and so one of the cameras doesn’t work. So I couldn’t even take part in BeReal if I wanted to.
