News UK: “With Snapchat, it feels like we’re living in a post-uniques world”
- Tuesday, October 17th, 2017
- Share this article:
When Snapchat first added Discover back in 2015, it seemed like a slightly unusual decision. A daily news service didn’t seem like the most obvious fit for a messaging app whose speciality was self-deleting photos. But the platform has been well adopted, by both publishers and users – just last month, Snap announced that Discover had 10m monthly users in France, around 15 per cent of the entire population.
There are around a dozen publishers with Discover channels in the UK, and it seems they’re taking the platform seriously. According to Sophie Tighe, Snapchat editor for The Sun, the paper has a dedicated team of 10 editorial and design staff which produce its daily edition on Discover, publishing an average of 12 pieces of Snapchat-exclusive content every morning.
That’s a significant amount of staff dedicated to a platform which didn’t even exist three years ago – so what are the benefits of being on Discover today?
“From The Sun’s point of view, we’re reaching an audience who have not only never picked up the paper, but probably never read the site either,” said Tighe, speaking at the Mobile Marketing Brand Summit this morning.
As you might expect, that new audience means a different type of content than The Sun normally produces. That’s true of their presentation – stories are just as likely to be an infographic, video or animated graphic as they are a traditional article – but also what they cover.
Tighe uses the example of a story about Marnie Simpson, a reality TV personality best known for Geordie Shore. While it wasn’t more than a showbiz section news-in-brief for the newspaper, the Snapchat team knew that Simpson was someone their younger audience cared about, and made it their lead story. “It ended up doing really well for us,” said Tighe.
It’s not just celebrity news, though, and Tighe believes that the Discover platform actually encourages quality content.
“Working in digital can sometimes feel like a race to the bottom, and content can suffer from a clickbait approach,” she said.
“With Snapchat, it feels like we’re living in a post-uniques world. They do report back on those figures, but that’s not the focus. The focus is engagement – swipe-up rate, completion rate, that’s what matters on Snapchat.”
From an advertising standpoint, engagement is important because of how ads are placed on Discover. Users have to swipe through three pieces of content in a Discover channel before they reach the first ad slot, so chasing a single click won’t earn the publisher any revenue.
“You can make your tile a picture of Kylie Jenner’s boobs – and some publishers have taken that approach – but the drop-off after the first story is huge,” she said.
Milton Elias, News UK’s head of mobile and video, explained what this means for the way the publisher sells Snapchat inventory to advertisers: “With Snapchat, users aren’t forced to watch an ad, they can just swipe on to the next piece of content.”
“What really does work for us from a Snap Ad perspective is, unsurprisingly, content that is created for the platform,” he said. “Content that’s bespoke and that we know is going to engage that user.”
Discover ads are limited to a single full-page unit, with any video or animation limited to a maximum of 10 seconds, but Elias reckons there’s still plenty of room to be creative. He pointed to a few examples of campaigns that had run on The Sun’s Discover channel, which varied from completely original content – like a ‘breaking news’ video from Hasbro, as part of its Vote Monopoly campaign – to assets that had been adapted to fit the platform with the addition of animated graphics.
“Clients don’t always have the opportunity to have completely bespoke video content, or a dedicated creative agency working for them,” he said. “But working with the editorial and design team, we can take assets created for print or online – whether it’s a video ad, or just still images and text – and make them more dynamic.”
According to Elias, this approach has actually influenced News UK’s overall digital ad strategy.
“We’ve taken a learning from Snapchat and the type of content we’re producing,” he said. “Mobile is 91 per cent of our digital audience, but the reality is that ads are rarely created for that screen.
“As a result, we launched V-Studio in June. The idea is to take brand’s assets, make them vertical and add interactive touchpoints, so they fit the mobile environment. So far, the ads created this way have shown a much higher engagement rate than non-optimised ads.”