This Week in TV News: Friendsgiving and Super Bowl Ads

This week we’re talking about Friendsgiving, influencer marketing during the holidays and Super Bowl ads.

Snapchat user growth. The ephemeral social app is growing 14% year over year, and by the end of this year, it should have 293 million global users, according to eMarketer. eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson says new features plus a redesigned Android app could explain the increase. By 2023, Snapchat is on track to total about 356 million users. (eMarketer)

Friendsgiving offers more opportunities to engage consumers. Friends are celebrating Thanksgiving together, and brands including Google, Grey Goose, Sabra and Taco Bell are taking advantage of the cultural phenom to engage with consumers. Taco Bell holds an annual Friendsgiving program in 2013, which involves a dinner hosted at the brand’s headquarters in California, and it releases a new recipe on its website each year for fans who can’t attend the gathering. Friendsgiving events have grown an average of 34.8% year-over-year for the last five years, according to research from Evite. (Adweek)

Super Bowl ads sell out. For the first time in five years, Fox Sports sold all its commercial inventory in Super Bowl LIV, which will air February 2, 2020. This implies, according to reporting from Variety, that advertisers are flocking for the live element in the era of mostly on-demand viewership. (Variety)

Holiday influencing is in demand. Marketers are upping their spend on influencers during the holiday season. From Nov. 1 through Dec. 21 last year, influencers using influencer marketing platform Fohr ran sponsored posts at a rate 30% higher than the average over the previous year and a half. Total influencer spend was between $4 billion and $8 billion in 2019, up from $500 million in 2015, according to influencer marketing agency Mediakix. (WSJ)

Read last week’s TV news.