Snapchat Succeeding with Brands
By Britt Waddell on 02/24/2015
(photo credit: Wired)
No longer just a social media platform with a risqué reputation, Snapchat has emerged as a rapidly growing advertising platform. According to comScore data cited in Digiday, Snapchat’s audience grew by 9 million users from 2013 to 2014. While this number hardly compares to Facebook or Twitter, the growth it enough for brands to pay attention.
Our client, Universal Pictures, was the first advertiser to utilize Snapchat with trailers for Ouija and Dumber and Dumber To. These ads appeared alongside My Story updates from users’ friends, but were labeled “sponsored.” Universal’s success with this early venture reveals two things: 1) that Snapchat is an effective means of advertising to young audiences and 2) even when this audience has the option to opt out of viewing an ad on the platform, a significant number (“millions,” according Universal execs) will choose to engage. McDonald’s recently entered the Snapchat advertising scene with the same type of campaign.
Other brands, such as Samsung and Macy’s, have used Snapchat’s Our Story feature to allow users to aggregate content into a live stream of advertiser-sponsored events. In both cases, the user likely feels more engaged with the brand than they would on another platform, since Snapchat offers audiences both the independence to opt into viewing ads at will and the instant gratification of contributing to a live feed.
Moving forward, Snapchat likely will offer more innovative ways for brands to engage with its user base, with a focus on creativity. The new Discover platform just launched with just under a dozen media partners, from The Food Network to Vice Media. Each partner has its own channel on the platform, where creative can post content that—like all content on Snapchat—disappears within 24 hours. MediaPost outlines Cosmopolitan’s plans for Discover, which include a daily series of swipable articles with sponsored content between ads—almost like ads within ads.
The Discover platform offers a solution to a potential roadblock for Snapchat advertisers. Using the Our Story feature or adding sponsored content to users’ main feeds works as long as Snapchat remains a new frontier in paid social, but eventually cluttered feeds and content overload could numb users to even the most creative campaigns. By creating channels for partners, Snapchat maintains user autonomy while providing advertisers with a way to reach them.
Sources
Digiday: http://tinyurl.com/p4lb8r6
MediaPost: http://tinyurl.com/m3t7lnd
MediaPost: http://tinyurl.com/l4djngm
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