Snapchat’s new ad format invites people to click to view more from brands

Discover ads appear between the pieces of content posted by the publishers and, typically, just start playing. Now, there is this option for users to swipe up to reveal more from the advertiser.

The “Call of Duty” trailer was shot in landscape mode, wide-screen, so the promotion did not take advantage of Snapchat’s vertical video perspective, which the platform has pushed as a way for marketers to use mobile devices in a way that feels more natural. Still, clocking in at nearly two minutes, “Call of Duty” was a pre-existing trailer that had already run on other platforms, such as YouTube:

The advertiser pays for the ad based on the number of views the cover clip gets, and the swipe up is essentially a freebie for the marketer, the source said. It’s unclear whether this pricing model will last past the experimental phase. Snapchat declined to comment for this story.

The ad represents the first direct-response marketing available on the platform. It’s a deeper kind of engagement that some advertisers have been asking from Snapchat, and it could signal the start of more actions beyond just viewing extra video.

“We would love to have the ability in an ad to swipe up to see longer-form content,” said one Snapchat advertiser speaking on the condition of anonymity. “It’s something we’ve talked about, where you see a 10-second ad but then can watch a full trailer.”

It’s an important step because advertisers are concerned with viewability, though platforms have yet to come up with an industry-wide definition for what constitutes a view. Snapchat counts as a view any vertical ad that loads, even if a user skips over it quickly.

A video view that requires an action like the interactive Snapchat ad is what marketers consider a lean-in experience. Studies show that users are more likely to view an entire video if they actually click on it to consume.

On two-minute videos, almost 30 percent of viewers watch to the end if they first had to click it to get it started, because it shows initial interest in the subject matter, according to a recent report from Kinetic Social. Autoplay videos of that length get a less than a 10 percent completion rate.