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Meta Starts its First Ever US Marketing Push for WhatsApp
1 Feb, 2022 / 02:27 PM / Reeny Joseph

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 Meta is kicking off the first-ever US marketing push for WhatsApp, focusing on the privacy offered by the app’s encryption. The first TV ad will air during the AFC Championship Game, comparing unencrypted messages to a stranger opening your physical mail. Similar ads touting WhatsApp’s privacy will soon start appearing on billboards around the country and online.

The goal of the marketing push is to get more people in the US to switch to WhatsApp by highlighting the app’s security relative to other texting methods like SMS, according to Meta’s head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart. “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,” he tells 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.”

Cathcart thinks that WhatsApp’s availability on both iOS and Android is a selling point for those who are frustrated by the experience of texting across platforms. He says the company is working to let you easily sync your chat history from an iOS device to any Android phone and vice versa. And last year, WhatsApp rolled out fully encrypted backups — something that Apple has yet to offer with iMessage.

There are more than 5 billion unencrypted SMS messages sent in the U.S. every day, according to a 2019 study by CTIA. Much of that volume is likely spam and promotional messages, but SMS is also the default texting method for a lot of Android phones, or used when someone on iMessage texts with an Android device

The fact that this marketing push is coming after the rebrand to Meta is certainly convenient for WhatsApp. Like the screen you see when you first open the app, the TV ad airing this weekend says that WhatsApp is “from Meta” and not Facebook.