With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp it is already one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, however the most thriving markets for the app are all outside the US. Now Meta, the parent company hopes to turn the tables. Starting this weekend, Meta will kick off a major US marketing campaign for WhatsApp, focusing on the privacy afforded by app encryption.
WhatsApp points to the USA
The first TV commercial will air on Sunday during theAFC Championship Game, but similar ads, aimed at promoting WhatsApp privacy, will soon begin appearing on billboards across the country and online. The goal of this marketing campaign is to get more people in the US to switch to WhatsApp by highlighting the security of the app over other messaging methods.
Second Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp: “What we are noticing in the US is that, especially in the last two years with COVID, people are spending more and more time online (…) But there is a huge gap in the number of people using services with end-to-end encryption in the United States and those who do not use it than anywhere else in the world “.
There are more than 5 billion SMS unencrypted sent to the United States every day, according to a 2019 study by the CTIA. Google is starting to push hard for the adoption of RCS, the long-awaited update to SMS that adds features like read receipts and in some cases encryption. But Apple hasn’t shown any signs of wanting to add compatibility towards this feature to iMessage.
Cathcart thinks that the availability of WhatsApp on both iOS and Android is a strong point for those who want to send messages securely across all platforms. The company is therefore working on allowing chat history to be synchronized from a device iOS to any phone Android and viceversa. Just last year, WhatsApp launched fully encrypted backups, a feature Apple hasn’t added to iMessage yet.