BeReal and brands—how marketers are using the anti-Instagram
Chipotle, PacSun and Trident Gum are among the brands experimenting with the latest internet craze.
Aliver
Social media app BeReal is quickly becoming the latest internet craze despite having no filters, no short-form video and no ads. And yet, brands like Chipotle are already experimenting with how they can “be real” with their customers.
BeReal bills itself as “Not another social network;” the platform centers around connecting with friends for two minutes every day. The app sends out a push notification—⚠️ Time to BeReal ⚠️ —to all users at a different time each day; users then have two minutes to take a photo of themselves and what they’re doing at that moment. Once uploaded, they can see their friends’ photos as well. If pictures are uploaded outside of the two-minute mark, they are slapped with a “late” label.
Brands that want to try out the app—which has been dubbed the anti-Instagram—are also subject to the two-minute notification. “It’s a hurdle that makes BeReal so interesting to experiment with,” said Tressie Lieberman, VP of digital marketing and off-premise at Chipotle. The restaurant has been on BeReal since April, posting promo codes in their photos. The first 100 customers to use the codes in the app or online received a free entree. The codes were redeemed in less than a minute after posting, according to Lieberman. The brand recently posted a BeReal of a Chipotle employee in front of a “Buy the Dip” billboard in Times Square.
“We see a massive opportunity to highlight our brand’s transparency in fun ways for our fans on BeReal and engage Gen Z,” Lieberman said.
Still, the app will challenge brands that want to be part of the trend. “Since it's all about authentic capture, it feels more like a creator play,” Danisha Lomax, senior VP and head of paid media (West) and national paid social lead at Digitas wrote in an email. “But I do think brands that are open to sharing behind the scenes—maybe a beauty brand wants to showcase ingredients. It could be interesting as a collaborative social strategy ... No gimmicks though, just BeReal.”
In the current ecosystem of brands, ads, celebrities and influencers, the app’s focus on a circle of friends seems to be resonating. The app has been installed 20 million times, according to Sensor Tower, with 7 million of those installs happening in the U.S. BeReal has been in the top slot in the free app category in the Apple app store for weeks.
Founded in 2020 by French developer Alexis Barreyat, the app started gaining traction this year on college campuses and then got a boost from TikTok. One TikTok of a girl trying to post her BeReal at a Harry Styles concert received over 5 million views.
For now, many brands are jumping on the trend by instead posting images that look like BeReals on Twitter, where they have a much larger following, rather than on the platform itself. PacSun posted an image of what looks like models on set for a photoshoot; Trident Gum and Sour Patch Kids posted about the brands' gum mash-up; Vanderbilt Football posted a linebacker in the middle of a rope pull, cheered on by the team quarterback. CBS Studios, Netflix Canada and even Teletubbies have done the same.
The app does have its hiccups. Some complain that the app buttons don’t always respond, or freeze when it’s time to take a photo, causing submissions to be marked as late even if they were taken on time. Whether the app has the staying power of TikTok, for instance, is yet to be seen.
Should brands decide to actually get on BeReal, they will need to have clever content ready and waiting for the notification, Stacy Durand, CEO of media buying agency Media Design Group, wrote in an email. “But posts will need to be very simple to blend in with the un-curated nature of the app.”
