Rumors that Facebook was exploring a partnership with Secret--one of a new breed of online services that let you send messages anonymously--puzzled many people. It wasn't simply that Facebook had spent years trying to keep anonymous communication off its popular social network. The bigger puzzle was that Secret seemed to undermine Facebook's primary business model, which relies on mining users' personal data to closely target online ads. Secret, a place to share sometimes defamatory and unsavory messages behind the veil of anonymity, seemed like something advertisers would shun.
But according to Mike Downey, senior vice president of business development at Whisper, another anonymous messaging service, his company is already working with blue-chip advertisers, just two years after launch. Whisper's anonymous messages can be just as unsavory as those on Secret, but Downey says top brands are intrigued by the possibility of reaching the people sending them. Advertisers are placing background images inside messages written by users, but they're also sending their own anonymous messages, known as whispers.
"Whisper feels like a natural branding medium," Downey said this week at Source 14, a mobile app conference put on by analytics firm Flurry. "We're approached by brands and movie marketers and television marketers all the time that want to test things in the form of whispers."
According to Downey, advertisers are attracted to Whisper's reputation for fostering genuine, frank discussion--the blessing and the curse of all anonymous sharing platforms. "The idea behind Whisper is by removing personal identity and ego, you create a more authentic and honest social media experience, therefore the content becomes more compelling than what you might see on a legacy platform," Downey said.
To be sure, Downey didn't give any hard numbers in describing the company's advertising efforts, and Whisper isn't profitable. But at least one advertiser backs up his claims, and this offers the tantalizing possibility that there just might be a way to make money from anonymity. It bodes well not only for other anonymous-sharing startups like Secret but for Facebook, which is trying harder to appeal to privacy-conscious teens, part of the core audience for anonymity apps.
>It bodes well not only for other anonymous-sharing startups like Secret but for Facebook, which is trying harder to appeal to privacy-conscious teens, part of the core audience for anonymity apps.
When Universal Pictures wanted to promote Endless Love in February, Downey says, Whisper helped it push out messages related involving the themes that underpin the romance movie--"dating bad boys and loss of innocence and disapproving parents," as Downey put it. These messages were placed atop a background image promoting the movie, and they took the form of questions like "What are three words to describe your first relationship ever?" That particular message brought more than 10,000 whispering replies.
Doug Neil, executive vice president for digital marketing at Universal, says the Endless Love campaign "worked very well," in part because Whisper and its community suited the movie's themes of youth, isolation, and unexpected connections with strangers. "We engage with those [anonymous sharing] apps because they have traction and an audience," Neil says. "Movie marketers are always looking for what is relevant or what is current in terms of where people are spending their time."
But Neil is quick to add that the Whispers of the world aren't perfect. One downside of anonymous apps is that users are less likely to re-post content. "You miss out on some of the amplification that takes place" on other social media services, he says. For now, he explains, brands are wading into anonymous sharing only when the disconnected, nameless environment reinforces whatever message they're trying to get across.
That said, a service like Whisper can also serve as a testing ground. According to Downey, experiments on Whisper help companies decide what themes to emphasize in campaigns on other social media like Facebook and Pinterest. In other words, Whisper can be a low-stakes forum where advertisers can test ads before graduating to larger and more sensitive audiences.
Indeed, he says that most Whisper advertisers haven't gone beyond the "exploratory" stage. Apparently, they're a bit wary of the medium. This is a social network, after all, that made headlines when someone floated a rumor, strenuously denied, that a Hollywood star had cheated on her husband. Whisper employs somewhere north of 100 content moderators, but advertisers would like to see even more filtering.
Similar things are happening on other services. In February, Gap became the first Fortune 500 company to post to the app Secret, according to Mashable. This wasn't an advertisement per se, but on the web, such stunts are often a prelude to paid advertising. The Fox television network, meanwhile, promoted its sitcom "The Mindy Project" using Tinder, an app that lets you semi-anonymously hit on people who are physically near you (Tinder exposes your Facebook profile picture and first name, but not your full identity).
Of course, advertising isn't the only way for an app to make money. Whisper is also exploring the possibility of extracting revenue directly from its users. It has tested a tool that charges users for the ability to send direct messages to the anonymous and otherwise unreachable authors of particular whispers. The company can activate this tool with the flip of a virtual switch, Downey says, but at the moment, the company is biding its time as it builds its base of users and evaluates whether such a premium tool would be compelling enough.
At least for the time being, Whisper is wise to keep its direct messaging free. Secret has stolen much of Whisper's buzz and is in no rush to monetize. The company closed an $8.6 million Series A round in March, led by blue-chip venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. The same week, Whisper closed a $30 million Series C round led by vaunted investor Sequoia Capital. Advertisers might be interested in Whisper and Secret, but the startups are not particularly hungry for their cash at the moment. They can afford to take their sweet time experimenting, searching for ads that are the least offensive and threatening to their growing base of users. Madison Avenue is waiting on standby for when they're ready. Or so it seems.
