Snap Pitches New Ad Solutions for Marketers at NewFronts

In its NewFronts presentation today, Snap announced a slew of new ad solutions for marketers available across the platform, alongside content partnership opportunities for brands and creators. Now, through its new global offering First Story, advertisers can reserve the first Snap Ad, or video ad between Friend Stories. Reserving the first Snap Ad is a highly requested feature by advertisers, the company said, and is estimated to reach a potential 50 million people in the U.S. each day. Its early partners include brands like Louis Vuitton and Warner Bros., the latter will be executing the first global takeover for its upcoming feature The Flash. Snap’s new ad solutions come after the company’s missed first-quarter revenue estimates of $1 billion, which was down 7% from the same period last year. Snap closed the quarter with $989 million. The company pointed to Apple’s privacy changes that made collecting data for targeted ads a challenge for advertisers. CEO Evan Spiegel in a statement said that Snap was working on “significant improvements” to its advertising platform to help drive increased return on investment for its ad partners. “We’ve made a bunch of very big strategic investments in the last six months, all geared at increasing value for our clients,” said Snap’s new president of Americas Rob Wilk. Snap also announced the launch of ads in Spotlight, the platform’s entertainment avenue for user-generated content. Over 350 million Snapchatters watch Spotlight content every month and advertisers can manage their placements within Spotlight via Snapchat Ads Manager. Snap moderates Spotlight’s content before releasing it to its audience to mitigate the risk of ads appearing next to misinformation, hate speech or other potentially harmful content, the company said. Meanwhile, total time spent watching Spotlight content grew over 170% year over year, according to Snap’s Q-1 report. “Value of Snapchat goes beyond reach,” said Nina Mishkin, director and head of brand strategy at Snap Inc. “Audiences are paying attention. That’s what drives eyeballs and impact.” The company is also testing sponsored links within its AI chatbot, My AI, to deliver more relevant content to its users. For example, if a person is talking about a video game with My AI, a retailer can share a sponsored link for a similar game in the chatbot. However, Snap’s AI tool has appeared to be an unpopular feature over privacy concerns. An analysis by cyber security consultants CloudTech24 found that the Google search for "delete Snapchat" exploded 488% worldwide after the social media giant introduced the My AI feature to all user accounts. Searches for "how to delete a Snapchat account" rose by 70% globally in the last week of April. “The My AI feature uses the data that Snapchat collects about each user to make its interactions feel more like a conversation with a friend,” a CloudTech24 spokesperson told Adweek via email. “These findings provide an eye-opening insight into the staggering rise in Snapchat users looking to cancel their accounts from across the globe, with many claiming the new feature as a violation of privacy.” Expanding creator collaboration opportunities Snap also announced the launch of Snap Star Collab Studio in the U.S., an end-to-end service for brands to source, partner and drive results with Snap Stars (Snapchat's top creators and public figures). Brands such as NYX Professional Makeup, a subsidiary of L'Oréal, tested Snap Star and saw a 13x return-on-ad-spend norm and over 90% of the incremental sales came from new buyers, according to Snap. The Collab Studio’s collaboration partners include Studio71, Beeline by Brat TV, Influential and Whalar, whose teams will help brands create and execute sponsored Stories and customized ad creative with Snap Stars. The company announced new sports sponsorship packages for marketers to activate across the platform during big sports events such as the upcoming Women’s World Cup in July.