Franchise News
Adweek: Snapchat is Now Allowing More Brands to Run Ads Between Friends’ Stories
Brands will be capped at three time-based promos per day.
When Snapchat unleashed its ad-tech program Snap Partners in June with plans to serve video ads between stories, observers wondered how users would respond to seeing ads alongside their friends' videos and photos. Two months in, Snapchat is already expanding its initial pilot to include more advertisers eager to reach the app's 150 million daily users.
The ads appear between strings of photos and videos that users have share with their followers. Snapchat caps the amount of ads so that each person is served three so-called Snap Ads Between Friends promos per day—one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one at night.
Over the past few weeks, the number of ads has steadily increased. Based on Adweek's own testing, each Snapchat user views the same number of daily ads, regardless of how much content they consume. In other words, someone who watches 100 stories per day is exposed to the same number of ads as someone who watches a handful of clips. Snapchat declined to comment about its ad load.
Ten brands—including Verizon, Express and Procter & Gamble—piloted the ad format earlier this summer, and now the format is available to a wider group of marketers. Dunkin' Donuts, Unilever's skin care brand Simple, L'Oreal-owned Maybelline, Starbucks and JCPenney have all run ads between snaps in the past week.
Similar to Snapchat's broader Snap Ads format that runs within Discover and Live Stories, the length of a skippable video ad in between snaps is limited to 10 seconds. They can also be targeted by age, gender, location, type of device, carrier and content affinity. But unlike Discover or Live Story ads, vertical videos between snaps don't include options to "swipe up" to watch a longer video clip or visit a website, which Snapchat has been pushing advertisers to experiment with in recent months.
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About the Author
Nick Powills
FollowNick Powills, CFE, founded No Limit Agency in 2008 and serves as Chief Brand Strategist for the Chicago-based firm. No Limit is a full-service communications agency that establishes and elevates brands by bridging Public Relations, Social Media, Marketing, Advertising, Digital, and a lot of creativity, to best strategize well-rounded and successful campaigns for 50+ global franchise brands. By presenting visionary ideas and building real relationships, No Limit is able to create effective media branding strategies to help companies grow. Nick currently leads a staff of writers, media strategists, designers, social media experts and digital producers in an office think-tank where brands are humanized for strong, compelling media stories. Prior to starting No Limit at the age of 27, Nick spent four years working at a franchise PR agency where he mastered the art of building rapport with media outlets and creating newsworthy pitches for earned media placements. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism from Drake University in Iowa.
