As with all things, it seems, Snapchat are now going to be offering ad space in their App, in a variety of ways. After proving that it is not just a flash in the pan, it seems as though businesses are realising that Snapchat could be an innovative new way of advertising their project – after all, it’s an as yet untapped market and how dare we enjoy something online without having adverts forced into our eyeballs…
Sneaky Advertising
You may have already noticed one form the advertising is going to be taking while watching a whole bunch of your contacts’ stories in a row. Cheekily slipped in between a video of one person’s cat being adorable and another of someone filming their entire night out, there will be a short ad. Intended to be pretty seamless, it is likely to cause some confusion at first, but thankfully it shouldn’t be too often, or at least not every time someone’s story finishes!
We’re not sure as of yet how these will be received by the users of Snapchat. Will they be annoying and intrusive? Or perhaps, as with a lot of advertising, they will become so commonplace that they will no longer have any effect at all.
Good for Business
For those who are interested in buying ad space on Snapchat, they are aiming to make it as easy as possible, offering to connect businesses with those skilled and experienced at creating Snap Ads, both from a creative point of view, but also the technical aspects. They are also enabling statistic and metrics in order for businesses to be able to monitor the return on investment as they would in any other advertising platform, which helps to legitimise it as a form of marketing.
Brand Filters
Furthermore, as the popularity, and cult-status of their filters has grown, Snapchat are now offering companies the chance to sponsor and create their own. Of course, the clever aspect of this is that the users are choosing to advertise (whether they realise it or not!) a product, film or event to their followers through something a little more interesting than a standard banner ad. This is an innovative technique that is unique to Snapchat and so it has an edge that would not be easy to replicate on other social media platforms
These brand based filters have recently been used by Gatorade and Taco Bell to great success and thanks to Snapchat’s analytics we can see that Gatorade received over 160 million views and Taco Bell a colossal 224 million!
Technology and culture are ever changing and evolving. What once was an app that allowed us to send questionable, yet temporary, pictures to one another has now become a giant in innovative marketing and advertising. Only time will tell how this will progress, and we are very excited to see what creative Snapchat filters we are going to get in the future as a result of this!
