Snapchat’s ads – too pricey?

It’s recently been reported in AdWeek that Snapchat is planning to charge brands $750,000 per day to run a new ‘my story’ ad. But would advertising on Snapchat be worth the $750,000 price tag? Snapchat do provide some advertisers with the perfect platform for an experimential opportunity; with its different ad format, demographics and immediacy. Eventhough this demonstrates a unique advertising opportunity for a willing brand, Facebook as an alternative appears to be more robust and cost-effective, with successful campaigns starting at around £3.However, the nature of Snapchat does identify multiple opportunities for it to be a successful and demanding ad platform, notably:• The users/community are required to be engaged with the app in order to digest content, as ‘snaps’ or ‘stories’. Unlike Facebook and Twitter where users can passively consume content, Snapchat users are required to hold down a button to see content, and therefore they actually want to see the ad and are looking at the screen with the ad is served • Snapchat is used by approximately one-third of millennials (18-34 year olds), according to comScore. For many advertisers, such as Red Bull, this is the only target audience they care about. • “Paid posts adopt the same format, and placement as organic posts”, as New York Times’ Mat Yurow explains.But what happens after you have forked out on the $750k price tag? The AdWeek report claims that the capabilities of Snapchat are ‘limited’ – there are no age breakouts, or distinctions between gender use. Furthermore, with a price tag over twice as much as ESPN’s Monday Night Football (one of the most expensive places for a brand to advertise, at $408,000 in 2014), which has a viewership of around 9.6 million), is it a bit of a tough sell and too much of a gamble?Find out more from the original article at TechCrunch – http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/19/you-could-get-so-much-more/link: AdWeek – http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/snapchat-asks-brands-750000-advertise-and-wont-budge-162359link: Mat Yurow – https://medium.com/@myurow/why-brands-shouldnt-get-too-excited-about-snapchat-ads-a82ea4b60f6c