Dive Brief:
- Snapchat users are about to see more advertisers in between their friends’ stories, according to Adweek.
- After launching its Snap Partners program in June, Snapchat is expanding it to include additional advertisers.
- Ads will be capped at three per day to avoid hitting users with too many ads.
Dive Insight:
Brands should welcome the expansion of the Snap Partners program, with many advertisers keenly interested in reaching Snapchat’s 150 million daily users that skew toward younger demographics. When the app first launched, Snapchat's attitude toward marketers seemed ambivalent at best. But lately, Snapchat has been actively seeking to improve these relationships by improving targeting and measurement for in-app advertising, offering an ad partner program and launching an API.
Snap Partners had been running in pilot format with just ten brands testing the format, but now the program is expanding to a larger group of advertisers. Brands involved in the pilot include Verizon, Express, P&G, Dunkin’ Donuts, Maybelline and Starbucks.
The Snap Ads Between Friends format is set up to serve users with three ads per day — one each in the morning, afternoon and night. Users will only see three promotions each day, regardless of the amount of Snapchat content they consume.
With all its advertising including Snap Partners, Discovery and Live Stories ads, the video ads are limited to ten seconds. The highly restricted number of Snap Partners ads available serves as an indication of how serious Snapchat is about protecting the user experience and not turning its users’ off with too many ads since it has opened the app up to advertising.
"We have to be thoughtful about the inventory, ad load and the ad experience," Peter Sellis, Snapchat's head of monetization product, told Adweek when the app launched its API. "By doing this the right way, focused on creativity and doing it early, it allows us to be extraordinarily conservative. Something that I think often gets lost is that ad effectiveness can be inversely correlated with the number of ads that the viewer sees. If you see 50 ads in a day, the probability of you remembering them is low."
