If you follow time-cycles, you’d know that the general age group that has most spending power is from 35-40s. While they might have the highest spending power, young users between the age groups of 15-25 are the most influential ones.
Messenger has announced a new group AR feature for New Year’s, in conjunction with Cosmopolitan, which will enable people to ring in 2022 with interactive chicken nuggets in a champagne glass.
Messenger says in an official statement:
“Developed in partnership with Cosmopolitan, today we’re releasing Nugget Cheers, a brand new interactive AR video calling Group Effect created just for New Year’s Eve. The effect features the (weirdly) perfect pairing of champagne and chicken nuggets that you’ll be able to toast and share with friends on a Messenger or Instagram video call.”
The feature uses Meta’s group AR option for video calls, which it added recently, and enables multiple people within a group chat to engage with the same effect at once.
And now, they’ll be able to nod their heads in unison to activate chicken nuggets in a glass to celebrate NYE.
Gen-Z’s, has this got your attention yet, or…?
Social Media Today helps us analyze this. They say, “Part of Meta’s key challenge over the past five or so years has been that it hasn’t been able to keep touch with evolving web culture trends, an aspect that other apps, like Snapchat and TikTok, have excelled in.
Meta, through Facebook first, then Instagram, has gradually eroded any cultural nous within each of its apps, by instead focusing on massive growth, often over all else. Which has certainly succeeded in bringing the maximum amount of users to its apps, but in turn, that approach has also eliminated any exclusivity or cool factor that its platforms and features once had.
Essentially, the company has been built with a structure focused on growth, not culture, and as a result, you now have executives and leaders who are very skilled at building systems, and formulating engagement algorithms, but have no clue when it comes to what’s cool and trending, and what will generate the most buzz to help boost engagement amongst various groups.”
Which is why it’s always playing copycat, replicating the key features from other, cooler apps, and why, as a result, it’s lost all credibility among younger audiences as a cultural force.
Meta has more staff, more money, and more capacity that any other platform to develop new, cutting edge tools and options which could help it boost engagement across the board, yet no one would say that Facebook is cool, or even Instagram these days, as they’ve been overtaken by smaller, less resourced, but more in-touch players that know how to connect, and maintain connections with their respective communities.
When was the last time Instagram added a ‘must see’ AR option that wasn’t originally available on Snap or TikTok instead? What was the last Facebook feature that got you genuinely excited, or even interested in the app again?
Nothing that I’ve seen from any of the company’s execs would suggest that they have any real nous or understanding of modern web trends (Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s attempts to link into Instagram trends are particularly cringe-worthy), while new pushes like this, linking champagne and chicken nuggets, seem very forced and disingenuous – and even then, they don’t seem engaging or even interesting at all – Andrew Hutchinson voices his opinion.
There are also reply tweets like this from the Meta handle on Twitter, where it keeps trying to latch onto other trends via web lingo.
Maybe there’s something Meta has in the works that can help it win back youngsters in a whole other way, something metaverse-aligned, a next-level push that will help it become cool again.
Follow @itp.live to stay up-to-date with what it could be!