• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 20, 2025

I don't know if the team at Snap read my last post -- or for that matter, any of my previous posts -- on "dark media," but they released a new study this morning shedding new light on the subject.

Actually, the study -- conducted with Tinuiti and Alter Agents -- reaffirms some things I've already known and have referenced before in my posts, including the fact that it's not just the volume of content people share via forms of dark media, but the types of content.

That last part is very important, because as an industry, we put so much weight on the types of content-sharing we can see, measure, analyze, and plan, buy and post against. But we often have no idea how much relative consumer content-sharing is taking place in the darker places of the media universe.

In this case, we're talking about "dark social," of course, which includes forms of peer-to-peer content sharing not normally lit up by conventional industry data analytics, even social media listening posts and tools.

For their new study, the team utilized a "multi-phase" approach including ethnography, as well as a self-reported survey of more than 5,000 Snapchat augmented reality (AR) content-sharers to understand what types of content they share explicitly with their "inner circles."

This is an important insight for one of the darkest areas of media usage, because people share very different forms of content with their closest friends, family and colleagues than the type of self-affirming things they share in so-called "light social" that everyone can see.

While the Snap study does not drill down into granular forms of content by subject matter, it provides an interesting -- er, snapshot -- by media format that could be a proxy for their substance if you want to use your imagination.

Statistically speaking, the Snap users analyzed in the study indexed high for all formats -- including video, text, photos, ads from brands, as well as Snap's AR lens filters -- both in terms of what they sent and what they received from other members of their inner circles.

The study did find that AR indexed marginally higher than other content formats, but it was not statistically significant.

The point is not how AR performs vs. other formats, although that is one of Snap's unique points of differentiation vs. other social media platforms. The point is that people share a significant amount of all forms of content with their most intimate fellow users, and most if not all of that is absolutely dark to you. Except when studies like this one shed a little light on it.

You can see the rest of the study's findings here, but I just wanted to reinforce the notion about inner circles sharing content peer-to-peer in a way that is invisible for planners and buyers.

Wouldn't be interesting of someone tracked this over time, across platforms, as part of some syndicated research the ad industry could use to benchmark and index the relative performance of light vs. dark media?

For the record, Snap calls its findings a measure of "word-of-mouth," but it's really more a measure of one of the most important parts within that broader classification, which is the word-of-mouth we share with friends, family and colleagues -- something that years of communications planning research has shown to be some of the most influential kind.