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Snapchat recently shed additional light on its ad plans. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is looking to woo advertisers and cement Snapchat's future as an ad-friendly platform, Spiegel explained during an interview with Adweek published this week. Snapchat already supports some advertising through its Discover and Live Stories features. However, the photo-sharing app is looking to further monetize through increasing ad sales.
Snapchat is an incredibly appealing platform for brands looking to reach young mobile phone users. 60% of US smartphone users between the ages of 13-34 are frequent users of the disappearing-message app, Spiegel told Adweek. Snapchat's users are very active, too. It gets 2 billion views a day, nearly half of Facebook's daily video views, according to Adweek. This is a huge feat, considering Facebook's user base is almost 7x larger.
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Snapchat aims to utilize its full-screen, vertical video format to drive advertisers to the platform. Vertical video ads have an engagement rate nine times that of horizontally oriented ads, according to Adweek.
Snapchat ads also take up the entire mobile screen. This is a huge advantage over Facebook and Twitter, where native ads are horizontal and can be lost within feed formats.
Snapchat will not emerge as a major advertising platform without getting over some hurdles. Advertisers could worry that the placement of their ads within the Discover or Live Stories features are not easily visible to users. Both features require multiple swipes off the home screen and are not yet promoted through icons or user directions.
Running ads on Snapchat can also be expensive, as the unique format means that advertisers cannot reuse ads from other mobile campaigns, Bloomberg notes.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly for advertisers, Spiegel has made it clear that he is not ready to introduce targeted ads, according to Adweek. This could pose a major drawback for advertisers that value targeted ads on other platforms.
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