Brief:

• Snapchat, the image-messaging application that has 166 million global users, delivered on last month’s promise to offer a self-service tool to help marketers create video ads quickly and easily. The newly launched Snap Publisher lets marketers of any size develop video promotions in less than two minutes, Business Insider reported.

• Advertisers start the Snap Publisher tool and click on the “Create a Snap” option to see a selection of templates that can readily accept photos, videos and logos. The ads can be saved and published using Snapchat’s Ad Manager, another self-service tool that was released in June.

• Snap Publisher is intended to help smaller companies that don’t have million-dollar ad budgets to reformate and convert their existing ad materials into Snapchat’s vertical video format. 

Insight:

Marketers that want to place ads on Snapchat have had to spend extra time and money to reformat their materials for the platform’s vertical video format, which addresses how smartphones are used in portrait mode most of the time. Snap Publisher aims to make it easier to create ads for the platform and addresses how some marketers prefer to work directly with digital marketing platforms rather than having an agency create and place their ads. 

As Snap faces growing competition from Facebook’s Instagram photo-sharing app, it has had to devote greater resources to innovating and making its platform more accessible to a wide group of marketers. Facebook has provided self-serve tools for marketers, including its Ads Manager, Power Editor and Creative Hub. However,for marketers, the growing number of self-serve tools could provide a challenge in terms of having the resources to learn how to use each. “It’s difficult for designers to learn multiple social platform design tools when they are all uniquely built to create specific ad products,” Paul Vincent, CEO at adtech firm Neuranet, told Mobile Marketer by e-mail.

While major advertisers and content providers have the resources to create specialized ads for Snapchat, there's a major barrier to entry for smaller marketers with fewer resources. Snap Publisher comes about a month after the company introduced products to make its ad delivery platform for useful to mobile marketers. The self-serve Ad Manager tool lets customers bid for ad space and pay for it with credit cards in the U.S., according to CNBC. The company reviews all ads for quality.

Last week, an analyst at Snap’s lead investment bank chided the company for delays in rolling out an automated bidding platform for brands that want to buy ad space on the app. The technology likely won’t be fully operational until the end of 2017 or early 2018, said Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. Adding an affordable advertising platform for businesses of all sizes is a key way for Snap to contend with rivals like Facebook.