Currently with over 100M daily active users, newly renamed Snap Inc. is on its way to quite possibly becoming the next multi-billion-dollar tech giant. With over 10 Billion videos being watched per day on their social media platform, Snapchat, and reaching between 40% - 60% of all daily users, it’s hard to believe companies wouldn’t want to cash in on the advertising gold rush of the late 2010’s; especially now since Snapchat is about to roll out a new API (application programming interface) platform.
As of right now, Snapchat offers advertisers three native ad types: Snap Ads (full-screen vertical video ad units), Sponsored Geofilters (brand imagery and messaging that conveys the “where and when” of a snap), and Sponsored Lenses (brand imagery that Snapchat users can employ to enhance or alter selfies). Snapchat’s new API will help brands dive deeper into those different types of targeting to help retrieve better data on their campaigns; which in other terms means more money. The targeting features of Snapchats new API platform include:
- Snap Audience Match (Email Matching): Target people based on their email addresses and “unique advertising identifiers attached to their phones.” This will open up opportunities for retargeting as well.
- Lookalikes (Interest Based Targeting): Target people who share characteristics with a certain audience.
- Snapchat Lifestyle Categories (Sequential Messaging): Target people based on interest categories like gaming, music, technology, and sports.
Snapchat users are allowed to skip over an advertisement as quickly as they do a snap story from their most “basic” contact, which could turn a lot of companies off. However, with success stories from Gatorade, Jameson, Kraft and Fox, Snapchat has caught the eye of not only a lot of consumer giants but your local business stores as well. In terms of ad revenue, they’re taking the escalator straight to the top. They are projected to more than double their mobile ad revenue in 2017 and break a billion in 2018. More ad revenue means investments into more advanced advertising platforms. These platforms will make it easier to target, analyze and grow companies as advertising transitions into a more mobile time period. It seems as though Snapchat and mobile advertising are the way of the future as the so called ‘digital age’ starts to become stagnant. How far will Snapchat take advertising over the next decade? I guess we’ll have to find out 10 seconds at a time.
