Snapchat VP of content Nick Bell explains the 2 biggest misconceptions about the app

Snapchat

Two of the biggest misconceptions facing Snapchat when it pitches its business to advertisers are that it's expensive and that it only caters for young people, according to the company's VP of content Nick Bell.

Speaking at Advertising Week Europe on Monday, Bell explained that the young demographic of Snapchat is increasingly broadening.

Two-thirds of the audience on Snapchat is over 18, Bell said.

Snapchat now has 100 million daily active users and 50% of new users are over 25-years-old, according to Bell.

The second big misconception advertisers have about the ephemeral photo-sharing app is that it's expensive, Bell said.

When Snapchat first went out to market, it was asking brands to fork out a minimum of $750,000 per day for a "Stories" ad, which some marketers thought was too expensive for such a young and untested app, according to Adweek.

"A handful of the very first campaigns we ran, to be frank, we didn't have a huge ad tech platform. If you wanted to run a campaign, it had to reach a mass reach audience, it was getting huge reach, and therefore was expensive," Bell said. "Some of those numbers are still banded around as our entry-level price points."

Since then, Snapchat has introduced more targeting options — such as age, location, device, and context — meaning advertisers can pay a lower amount to reach a smaller, more specific audience.

Bell said the entry-level pricing for ads is "tens of thousands now."

Snapchat also recently introduced a new geo-filter advertising product where advertisers and individuals can pay an even smaller amount to place location-specific (such as at a party or an sporting event) graphic overlays for a select time period.

Bell also said one of the misconceptions he's met in the ad market, which isn't specific to Snapchat, is the obsession from marketers for videos to need to be viewed to completion.

"The concept of watching to completion has been over-played in the marketplace. Just because I created a 30-second TV spot doesn't mean it's the optimum amount of time to view that content," Bell said. "Research shows attention span on mobile is much lower, getting a message across in two, three, four, five seconds is often more powerful than trying to stretch out a message and build a load of context."

Instead, mobile viewers are often more engaged with the "velocity and pace of storytelling," Bell added.

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