There’s no rest for ghosts… errr, the ambitious in Silicon Valley, and Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel – yes, the person responsible for those cute dog face filter photos – recently announced that Snapchat ads and users’ personal stories will soon be showing up on other apps through the Snapchat Audience Network and Snapchat Ad Kit. Both big brands and small will soon be able to bring their Snapchat ads to other apps, and users will now be able to post their personal Snapchat Stories to other apps too.
Digital forecasts are furthermore predicting that mobile advertising will top $93 billion dollars in ad spend in 2019 – which is $20 billion more than TV – so it’s no surprise that Snapchat is working to capitalize on that market.
“So how exactly does this all work?”
More than 200 apps are already integrated with the privacy-safe Snap Kit, which allows users to log into other apps with Snapchat and bring back native app content to Snapchat, i.e., Bitmoji. Our Stories content, stickers, the new Snap Ad Kit, and Audience Network take the integration a step further.
Akin to Facebook’s Audience Network, a way to extend reach of Facebook ads on their digital real estate of websites and apps, the new additions to the Snap Kit will allow for app developers to finally be able to get their piece of the Snapchat advertising pie. When an app developer signs up for the program, they will be able to integrate Snapchat’s SDK and fill their ad inventory with the same full-screen, vertical video ads that appear in the Snapchat app. Everything comes at a cost, of course, so Snapchat will be making sure they get some pie too in the form of ad revenue. What that revenue split will be remains to be seen.
You’re probably wondering how you’ll get your cute filtered photo on to other apps, so here’s the fun part! In an effort to keep users engaged with the platform as long as possible, users will soon see an option to share their photo or video on integrated apps through App Stories. These stories will appear in designated areas within other apps – they can even be placed alongside people’s photos while browsing Tinder or shared with group chat social network Houseparty. While advertisers don’t yet have the ability to run ads between stories on these integrated apps, that capability will surely be coming soon.
“Anything else?”
Here a few other fun and upcoming Snapchat integrations marketers should have on their radars:
- The Bitmoji Kit will bring your personalized avatar off your phone and onto select smart watches and fend-sharing platforms.
- Preview image (but not trailer) sharing from select online streaming services to your Snapchat Stories.
- A new publisher tool will allow you to share that interesting news story you just read directly to your Story.
- Like multi-player games and Augmented Reality? Cool, those are coming to Snap too.
“Your move, Mark Zuckerberg.” – Evan Spiegel, probably.
Reach out to [email protected] to learn more about how your brand can connect with our in-house Snapchat & social advertising specialists.
