The people who know how best to market to college students are other college students – and that’s doubly true on a social media platform whose entire user base is college students.
Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer dropped out of Stanford to focus full time on Fizz, an (optionally) anonymous social media platform they co-founded in 2021 that, similar to the app Yik Yak, allows users to communicate with other students nearby.
Unlike Yik Yak, however, which is solely geography based, Fizz’s communities are based on college enrollment. Students verify their enrollment with a school email address and can then join their campus community on the app – not dissimilar to the early days of Facebook, but with an added layer of anonymity.
Meet in the middle
Fizz markets itself as a “discussion and news feed” app on which users can post text, photos and videos, either anonymously or attached to a handle. They can also communicate with other users via comment threads and direct messaging.
The app’s user base doubled between the autumn of 2024 and this year and is roughly five times larger than when Fizz raised its Series B funding in 2023. Although it declined to share an exact user number, Fizz is now active on over 700 campuses nationwide.
Like on any nascent, rapidly growing platform, monetization and advertising quickly became a necessity. Last year, Fizz began piloting an advertising model with brands such as Perplexity and Quizlet. Advertisers can run static, text-based and video ads that link directly to an app store or an external landing page.
Although Fizz now allows multiple brands to advertise per day, it ran a test for the month of September during which it tried out a one-advertiser-per-day model, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Each day, one single brand would exclusively run on the platform, appearing only in the top-of-feed slot. The ad copy and creative would vary depending on the school and its location, like, for example, leaning into “game day” and sports-related messaging for schools with a big sports following.
Several variations of the ad would run across Fizz’s entire user base, functioning as an A/B test of sorts, said Solomon, who also serves as CEO. Whichever version performed best for the first half of the day would then be the only version displayed during the latter half.
As of now, Fizz still only offers school-level as opposed to user-level targeting.
But advertisers have been seeing striking results. One dating app got an 11.5% click-through rate, and its one-day takeover of Fizz helped boost its rank in the App Store from around 200 to 40.
Fizz still allows a single advertiser to reserve the premium top-of-feed spot each day, but hasn’t yet decided how to manage demand for that ad space, or a defined pricing tier.
At the moment, advertisers can only buy ads on Fizz directly, although programmatic is on the horizon, said Solomon. But it’s important to approach advertising in a “crawl, walk, run manner,” he added.
“You can’t just, like, throw a ton of programmatic ads in and call it a day,” said Solomon, “because, although that might get us more money, that’s not the goal.”
The goal, he said, is to ensure that ads are personal and engaging, and that brands are happy with the results.
Know thy users
One major advantage that Fizz offers its advertisers is the cultural knowledge of its 23-year-old founders.
Most of the marketers Fizz works with “are in their 40s, or whatever,” said Solomon, whereas the Fizz team is much closer in age, and thus culture, to its user base. Solomon and his team work directly with advertisers to make sure that their campaigns don’t “come off as corporate or cringy,” he said.
Sometimes, Solomon looks at an ad and just knows that it won’t resonate – or, as he put it, that “they’re gonna meme the hell out of this.” And if an ad reads too obviously corporate, like, well, 40-somethings trying to sound like college kids, that’s an immediate red flag.
Fizz encourages advertisers to use more authentic college vernacular and adjust ad copy based on school culture and geography.
The “manual interaction” between Fizz and its marketer clients is something Solomon doesn’t want to lose.
New beginnings
One thing he doesn’t have control over losing, though, is the graduating senior class.
The problem with an app for college students is that it’s very difficult to grow when its user base cycles with every incoming class.
This unavoidable churn is why Fizz is beginning to evolve beyond college campuses into broader communities. The product is pretty hush-hush for now, but retaining its user base post-graduation is the problem that Solomon wants to solve “first and foremost.”
“A quarter of our users graduate college each year, and historically, we’ve never had somewhere to put them,” said Solomon. “That keeps me up at night.”
