Creepy Uncle Sam, a character launched by Generation Opportunity in order to encourage young people to "opt out" of Obamacare, has joined Snapchat in a new campaign to reach out to young people.
Snapchat is a mobile application and social network that allows a user to send a picture or video to someone that self-destructs after a set number of seconds. Once the picture or video has been viewed, it is not able to be viewed again. The CEO of Snapchat made headlines recently for turning down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. Snapchat is very popular among teens and young adults.
It is believed that Generation Opportunity is the first organization to use Snapchat to communicate with young people.
Here's the promo:
While Generation Opportunity certainly is being innovative in this new campaign, I'm not sure how it's going to work. Except for the TeamSnapchat account (the creators of the app) it is impossible to mass-message everyone using the app. A person would have to add Creepy Uncle Sam as a contact in order to receive messages--and those who take the time to actually add Creepy Uncle Sam as a Snapchat contact are likely not Generation Opportunity's target audience of uninformed young people. Still, though, I must applaud Generation Opportunity for thinking outside of the box on this one.
Update: After sending Creepy Uncle Sam a Snapchat, he replied with this:
Well played, Creepy Uncle Sam.