Snapchat users who watch 'The Darkest Minds' trailer get Pandora access

Brief:

20th Century Fox partnered with Pandora to promote its film starring Amandla Stenberg, "The Darkest Minds," with a takeover of the Premium Access feature, according to information shared with Mobile Marketer. This means that any Snapchatter who received a Pandora song card on July 11 was able to swipe up to listen on-demand after watching a 15-second video trailer from Fox.
The video ad opportunity will be available to other advertisers beyond launch day. With Premium Access, any Snapchatters who receive a shared song will be able to swipe up to unlock Pandora's entire music library on-demand even if they don't have a Pandora subscription.
While listening to a song, Pandora users with the latest version of the app can tap "Share on Snapchat" to send a song in a direct message to friends or in their Story. Those on the receiving end can then access the shared song and view unique cards showing the song's album art in front of an animated background.

Insight:

The 20th Century Fox ad takeover shows how marketers can leverage integrations between popular mobile apps like Snapchat and Pandora. Patreon, Postmates and Tinder are also among the launch partners for SnapKit, with each company integrating their apps with Snapchat in various ways. Offering Snapchat users an opportunity to watch an ad in exchange for access to premium content from another app could help marketers get in front of new consumers and drive engagement with video ads while meeting the needs of mobile users, who want on-demand access to content.

Last month, Snap introduced Snap Kit, a collection of software tools that lets app developers add features like Bitmoji avatars to keyboards, display public Our Stories and Snap Map content and create augmented reality (AR) content and branded stickers to share among Snapchat users.

The collaboration between Pandora and Snapchat may help the companies to grow their respective user bases, especially as the feature doesn't require linking the two apps, which would add more friction to the process for users. Snapchat has 191 million users worldwide, although the new music-sharing feature is now available only in the U.S. As of Q1 2018, Engadget reported that Pandora had about 6 million paying subscribers. The company's listener hours had fallen 4.7% to 4.92 billion from a year earlier, but the new sharing feature with Snapchat should help to boost listenership and discoverability.

Snapchat this year has made a stronger effort to work with third-party app developers as the company seeks to cultivate a broader user base and better compete with Facebook's Instagram, which has successfully copied Snapchat features and grown its user base to 1 billion worldwide. Instagram in May introduced features to let users share moments from third-party apps to Stories, which strings together several videos and images in a single post. Instagram debuted the sharing feature with GoPro and Spotify, Pandora's archrival that had 75 million paying subscribers and 170 total active users as of the end of March. Spotify reports its Q2 results on July 26, and may show growth to 83 million paying subscribers and 180 million total users, according to Anthony DiClemente, a financial analyst at Evercore.