Adweek: Snapchat is Now Allowing More Brands to Run Ads Between Friends’ Stories

When Snapchat unleashed its ad-tech program Snap Partners in June with plans to serve video ads between stories, observers wondered how users would respond to seeing ads alongside their friends' videos and photos. Two months in, Snapchat is already expanding its initial pilot to include more advertisers eager to reach the app's 150 million daily users.

Over the past few weeks, the number of ads has steadily increased. Based on Adweek's own testing, each Snapchat user views the same number of daily ads, regardless of how much content they consume. In other words, someone who watches 100 stories per day is exposed to the same number of ads as someone who watches a handful of clips. Snapchat declined to comment about its ad load.

Ten brands—including Verizon, Express and Procter & Gamble—piloted the ad format earlier this summer, and now the format is available to a wider group of marketers. Dunkin' Donuts, Unilever's skin care brand Simple, L'Oreal-owned Maybelline, Starbucks and JCPenney have all run ads between snaps in the past week.

Similar to Snapchat's broader Snap Ads format that runs within Discover and Live Stories, the length of a skippable video ad in between snaps is limited to 10 seconds. They can also be targeted by age, gender, location, type of device, carrier and content affinity. But unlike Discover or Live Story ads, vertical videos between snaps don't include options to "swipe up" to watch a longer video clip or visit a website, which Snapchat has been pushing advertisers to experiment with in recent months.