SnapChat Finally Opens Up to Third-Party Ads
You may have heard the tremendous buzz about SnapChat, but found yourself scratching your head wondering about the exact purpose. Snapchat is a mobile messaging application used to share photos, videos, text, and drawings. It’s free to download the app and free to send messages using it. It has become hugely popular in a very short space of time, especially with millennials.
Today, according to the folks over at Net Imperative, it was reported that Snapchat ads are to be sold by third parties for the first time, as the notoriously secretive chat app makes a major shift to large scale advertising.
Under the new scheme, Snapchat’s vertical-video format will be rebranded in the coming weeks as Snap Ads.
The firm will also launch an application programming interface (API) letting partners plug-in to the system.
The major changes to Snapchat’s ad tools include:
• Snap Ads Between Stories – Ads will appear occasional when users auto-advance at the end of one person’s Stories to the next person.
• Ads API – Advertisers can now use programmatic interfaces to efficiently buy huge campaigns instead of having the manually strike deals with Snapchat.
• Expandable “Snap Ads” – Users swipe up on Snapchat’s ads to install a promoted app, watch a long-form video, visit a mobile website or view an Instant Article-style article formatted specifically for Snapchat.
• Snapchat Ad Measurement – Snapchat has also built a set of measurement partnerships including Moat, Nielsen mobile Digital Ad Ratings and Google DoubleClick to help advertisers monitor the success of their ads.
The Snap Ads platform will let ad tech companies automate the targeting and delivery of ads to the right Snapchat users, in a similar way that brands can target Facebook and Twitters users now.
Snapchat is one of the most sought-after platforms for advertisers given its 100+ million daily active users and 10+ billion daily video views. In the U.S., 60{4d2303c3d7018ed3e1a955ec2105d2bcecc5b881e14ee890535c5ae577f46e7a} of 13-34 year old smartphone owners use the app and overall gender composition is approximately 50{4d2303c3d7018ed3e1a955ec2105d2bcecc5b881e14ee890535c5ae577f46e7a} female and 50{4d2303c3d7018ed3e1a955ec2105d2bcecc5b881e14ee890535c5ae577f46e7a} male so the platform provides strong, balanced reach among highly-desirable audiences. Furthermore, with half of all Snapchatters located outside the US, there is a tremendous global opportunity.
In a bid not to scare away users, Snapchat insists that user experience will be protected by reviewing all ads for quality before they run and managing ad load so as not to overwhelm users with too much marketing.
