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Mary Meeker: People don’t just tolerate Snapchat ads — they play with them

Snapchat’s face-distorting ads seem to be working.

Snapchat is fun — and so are its advertisements, says Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker.

Meeker shared her annual internet trends report on Wednesday at the Code Conference in Southern California, and among her (many) slides on the current state of the internet were a handful about Snapchat.

One slide in particular stood out: This one, about Snapchat’s sponsored lenses, an ad type that lets brands like Taco Bell or 20th Century Fox pay so users can distort their selfies by putting their face on a taco or transform into a character from “X-Men”:

These ads are growing in popularity, Meeker said, with Snapchat’s recent Taco Bell campaign for Cinco de Mayo generating 224 million views — 36 percent more views than a similar campaign from Gatorade during the Super Bowl.

This line also stands out: The average Snapchatter plays with a sponsored lens for 20 seconds.

You don’t often hear about users, especially teens, “playing” with advertisements. But they do on Snapchat. And that’s one reason brands are lining up to hand Snapchat their marketing dollars, and why Snapchat is telling investors it will be a billion-dollar company in 2017.

Full disclosure: I agree with Mary!

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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