With its branded geofilters and video advertisements, Snapchat has emerged as one of the hottest marketing channels for brands. Retailers are customizing their campaigns for this medium to capture more Millenial audiences, which compose of 71% of total Snapchat users. Below are several tactics that have been proven to be useful to brands.
As Snapchat’s name suggested, it is much more effective to feature short and snappy contents, since the app’s millennial audience could be quick to hit skip. According to stats from sponsors, since 70% of audiences stop watching Snapchat videos after 3 seconds, brands should get their message out in two seconds, or else most won’t see it. In addition, brands choose to feature ads that are native and organic to the platform, which normally leads to higher completion rates. Brands that featured creative and customized Snapchat campaigns have witnessed substantial rate of favorability lift, such as the Snapchat Live Story for the MTV video music award, which saw a 28 percent completion rate, leading to a 50% increase of impressions and click-through of webpages related to MTV. According to the representatives from Viacom, since “Snapchat is where ads are pure, 100 percent in view of the screen, not hidden anywhere”, brands should narrate more creative and unique story-based contents.
Snapchat’s Discover channel, an original media feature that was unveiled this January, also opened multiple possibilities. Compared with other channels, Discover ads are less expensive in that Snapchat has agreed to let the publishers strike their own advertising deals with brands making the Discover ads cost approximately $0.15 per view. In addition, rather than leveraging algorithms to target audiences, Snapchat counts on editors and artists to determine what is important.
Brands often feature fresh contents on Discover so as to cross-promote. Sony Pictures has also purchased its own Discover channel to promote the newly released Bond installment “Spectre”, which will be labeled as “Sponsored” on the Discover tab. and will be loaded with cast interviews made specially for Snapchat, behind-the-scenes videos from the movie’s exotic shooting locals, as well as even sendable filters. Universal Studio has also purchased a sponsored snap story for its low-budget horror movie “Oujia” last year, which was simply composed of a trailer for it displayed on user’s Recent Updates list but wasn’t interactive or shareable like the channel for “Spectre” is.
In addition, Snapchat has developed its first call-to-action style ad last week. The ad for the Activision game, “Call of Duty: Black Ops 3” ran on the Daily Mail’s channel in the Discover section. It requires users to swipe up to view a full trailer, a mechanism that served to create a lean-in experience— a video view that requires an action. Similar to the results from interactive Snapchat Ads, showing that whenever the users actually click on the ads they are more likely to complete it, the two-minute call-to-action type ad has generated almost 30% completion rate, radically higher than that of Autoplay videos on Facebook, which amounts to a mere 10%.
Snapchat has also announced last week of its confirmed 6 billion daily view count, just days after Facebook reached 8 billion video views per day. Even though most videos are personal messages that friends send to each other and therefore not tied to advertising, Snapchat’s video-oriented approach has allowed it to usurp the crown as the focal point of youthful Internet usage largely due to the storyline nature of its contents. Retailers have been utilizing the Live Story framework to post video montages from special events like fashion runway shows or sports stadium. Sprite also ran a campaign last month, which started with 15 different Snapchat codes printed on cans that lead users to videos of fifteen celebrities sharing Sprite-related stories. Sprite is said to ship additional cans slapped with Snapchat logos that lead consumers to other users’ accounts on the messaging app. Sprite has also set up a pop-up retail location in New York this summer to offer people nearby special filters to put on their Snapchat photos.
With more hypes generated through custom filter overlays and additional sticks, Snapchat is said to attract more teenagers and twenty-somethings that are often disillusioned by traditional advertising. Through producing original and customized contents, as well as by generating interactions among fans via brand stories, retailers could talk directly to younger customers to promote the brand and the products.
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