WHATSAPP is launching a massive marketing campaign in the US to compete with messaging services like Apple’s iMessage.
The messaging app is kicking off its first-ever US marketing push at this weekend’s AFC Championship game.
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WhatsApp is already one of the most popular messaging platforms around as it boasts more than 2 billion users worldwide.
However, the majority of WhatsApp users are not based in the United States, but in countries such as India and Brazil.
For this reason, Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, is launching a comprehensive marketing campaign that will hopefully push more Americans to use the messaging app.
The marketing materials will focus mostly on WhatsApp’s encryption services and privacy features, for which the app is mostly known.
The campaign is kicking off this Sunday with a TV ad during the AFC Championship game, that will reportedly compare unencrypted messages to a stranger opening someone’s mail.
Meta is also planning to supplement its TV ads with commercial billboards across the nation.
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The overarching goal of the campaign is to emphasize WhatsApp’s security features when compared with unencrypted forms of messaging such as SMS, which is employed by Android devices.
As of 2021, there are more than 129 million Android users in the United States, according to Statista, which means millions are at risk of having vulnerable data breached by third parties.
Apple’s iPhones also default to unencrypted SMS and MMS when the device is not using its internal iMessage feature.
“What we’re seeing in the US is that, especially over the last couple of years with COVID, people are doing much more of their life online,” Meta’s head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart told The Verge.
“But there is a real gap in how much people are using services with end-to-end encryption in the US compared to everywhere else in the world,” he added.
Cathcart also noted that the company is working on a feature that lets you seamlessly sync your chat history from an iOS device to an Android device and vice versa, which he believes will be a big selling point for WhatsApp users in the States.
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