Snapchat makes changes to ease advertising: IAB NewFronts 2023
Snapchat has made a number of changes to the app for advertisers, announcing new solutions at the IAB NewFronts 2023.
The announcement:
Snapchat has returned to IAB NewFronts in NYC and announced new solutions for advertisers.
Snapchat is the house of real relationships – and these relationships influence friends and create a positive halo effect for brands.
Snap’s APAC president, Ajit Mohan: “I’m excited about today’s announcements which provide our advertising partners greater product enhancements that will have a material impact on reaching Snapchatters. Our platform is about real relationships and these new features will give brands more opportunities than ever before, to reach the 7.5 million Australians who are a part of the Snapchat community.”
Launching First Story:
We are introducing First Story, which enables advertisers to reserve the first Snap Ad (video ad between friend stories) that a Snapchatter sees.
This is a new takeover product, along the lines of our first commercial and first lens offerings, which let advertisers reserve the first sex-second non-skip commercial or first sponsored AR lens that a Snapchatter sees. This has been a highly requested feature from our advertising partners, and we’re thrilled to roll it out today. Early partners running First Story ads include Louis Vuitton, Warner Brothers and more.
Advertisers can reserve First Story placements in Snapchat markets around the world, and Warner Bros. will be executing the first global takeover for their upcoming feature, The Flash.
Launching ads in Spotlight:
We are launching ads in Spotlight for all advertisers globally. Over 350 million Snapchatters watch Spotlight content every month. In Q1, total time spent watching Spotlight content grew over 170% year-over-year.
Spotlight ads will initially be served as automatic placements interspersed within Spotlight content. Advertisers can manage their placements within Spotlight via Snapchat Ads Manager. Spotlight content is moderated before it can reach a large audience. This reduces the risk of ads appearing next to misinformation, hate speech, or other potentially harmful content.
New content partnerships:
We’re announcing a number of major upcoming sports sponsorship packages to help marketers activate across Snapchat during some of the biggest sports events in the world:
– New 2024 Paris Olympics: We’re excited to share that NBCUniversal will bring custom content to Snapchat from the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The content will include daily stories at the Olympics and Paralympics, plus Spotlight every day of the Olympics as well as the Snapchat camera with AR experiences and compelling experiential content delivered by a roster of Snap Stars immersed in Paris. More information about the exciting Olympic and Paralympic content from NBCU will be coming soon.
– New Women’s World Cup: Exclusive content across Snapchat’s Stories, Spotlight, and Camera will be available for the upcoming tournament. Our long-standing partners at the NFL, NBA, and WNBA will continue to provide content across stories and Spotlight, and more creative tools to create immersive fan experiences for our community.
These partnerships are a strong validation that Snapchat continues to be an important platform for some of the biggest sports leagues and events in the world.
Evolving My AI:
Messaging is at the heart of Snapchat, and conversational AI fits seamlessly into this core product value: Our global community – recently announced over 750 million monthly active users – creates over 5 billion Snaps every day.
Last month we announced the rollout of our AI-powered chatbot, My AI — previously available to our 3 million Snapchat+ subscribers — to our global community, and we’ve been excited to see our community using it to learn more about the world through conversation, across movies, sports, video games, or even what to wear to prom.
We also integrated Snapchat features directly into the My AI experience: it can now suggest relevant AR Lenses, recommend Places from the Snap Map and, coming soon, Snapchat+ subscribers can Snap My AI and get a unique generative Snap back that keeps the visual conversation going!
At NewFronts 2023, we are excited to share an early look at how we’re exploring even more ways My AI can improve our community’s experience across our service.
Improving content relevance for Snapchatters:
We believe that My AI has the potential to greatly improve a variety of experiences across Snapchat by understanding our community’s interests in a privacy-safe way. Conversations with My AI have the potential to help us deliver more relevant content and experiences across our app, whether a Snapchatter is watching Stories or Spotlight, or exploring our recommendations for fun and useful AR Lenses. We are in the early days of testing ways that conversational AI within Snapchat can lead to more engaging experiences for our community, like bringing Snapchatters mobile video powered by conversational intent for the first time.
Experimenting with sponsored links:
We are also experimenting with new ways that My AI can surface useful information for Snapchatters at the right moment during conversations.
This includes early testing of sponsored links in conversations with My AI to connect our community with partners relevant to the conversation in the moment, while helping partners reach Snapchatters who have indicated potential interest in their offerings.
We are in an early, experimental phase to ensure we design the right experience for our community and make sponsored links as useful as possible. Before determining if the conversation is eligible for a sponsored link, we run safety checks to detect abuse, policy violations, and content sensitivity on Snapchatter messages to My AI — taking a Snapchatter’s age into consideration as we continue to build My AI based on our privacy principles, and drawing upon our years-long commitment to protecting user’s privacy.
We have already seen strong engagement here during our initial testing, and look forward to sharing more information as we continue to experiment!
Source: Ogilvy PR
