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Snapchat launches new ad formats including promoted stories

Snapchat launches new ad formats including promoted stories

Ahead of the hotly-anticipated redesign of Snapchat, the app is getting a pair of new ad formats in an attempt to tempt brands to open their wallets a little wider.

The first is called 'Promoted Stories' and will see brands able to create their own strings of snaps, which will be promoted on Snapchat's stories homepage, sitting side-by-side with stories from friends and influencers.

"Our advertising partners have been asking for ways to tell deeper stories on mobile," Snap's director of revenue product Peter Sellis told TechCrunch, which first reported on the new ad formats.

HBO has already tested the promoted stories out in a Black Friday campaign for Game of Thrones. The stories can contain up to 10 photos and videos, as well as links to websites and app stores.

Snap is claiming that a promoted story can reach up to 88 million people in the US alone, including 47 million 13-24 year-olds. The company is under pressure from investors to keep growing its advertising revenues, following its IPO earlier in the year.

The second new ad format is called 'Augmented Reality Trial' ads, and is based on Snapchat's 'World Lens' feature which places objects (cartoon rainbows, for example) into the world around you. The ads will let companies pay to make some of those objects products: a BMW car, in one of the early examples.

These ads certainly offer more opportunities for brands to spend money with Snapchat. What about the impact on influencers? While in theory Snapchat's promoted stories will be competing with the content posted by social stars, in practice, it's quite possible that brands will want to hire in influencers to make the new ads as engaging as possible.

Earlier in November, Snap promised that it would be taking a friendlier approach towards the influencer community than it has in the past.

"In 2018, we are going to build more distribution and monetisation opportunities for these creators in an effort to empower our creative community to express themselves to a larger audience and build a business with their creativity," said CEO Evan Spiegel.

 


Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)