Snapchat offers sequential ads, targeting based on offline purchases

Dive Brief:

Snapchat is pitching marketers with a new ad format for Discover, according to Adweek. Sequential messaging will allow marketers to piece together video ads back-to-back opening increased storytelling opportunities via multiple ads.
One media buyer told Adweek that marketers could take an existing 30-second ad spot and turn it into three 10-second spots for Snapchat that run sequentially.
In other news, The Wall Street Journal reports that Snapchat has signed a deal with Oracle Data Cloud enabling marketers to target ads on the platform using offline purchasing data, the first time that third-party data is available for targeting on the platform.

Dive Insight:

Enabling third-party data is a move that brings Snapchat more inline with what Google, Facebook and Twitter already offer and is an important step in helping marketers make their ads more relevant. The sequential ad format, which allows borrows from the playbook of other social platforms, is still the more interesting development because it reflects the interest in figuring out how to tell stories on social media platforms, where users' attention spans are short. By linking one short ad to the next, the hope is that users will be more likely to follow it through to completion.

Sequential advertising is a tactic used on Facebook and Twitter to grab the attention of viewers who previously watch and/or engage with an advertisement in order to provide additional storytelling and messaging.

Brands advertising on Discover will likely appreciate the extended time for messaging, but the question is will Snapchat’s notoriously fickle user base actually absorb three sequential ads as suggested by the media buyer quoted by Adweek. Snapchat’s own metrics from late last fall indicate that its users watch video ads for less than three seconds. Even though Snapchat argued that its eye-tracking studies found that its ads get more attention than ads on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook even if they aren’t watched for long, it’s hard to see how those metrics square with a brand spending to run multiple short video ads back-to-back.

"I think it becomes unique in regard to storytelling. These guys are trying to get away with this idea of, 'Maybe if you watched three seconds of the first video, five seconds [of the second video] and then 10 seconds to finish the story, that's good as long as you get the point of the narrative,'" the buyer explained to Adweek.