What Snapchat Discover Means For Your Brand

Snapchat is not just 5-second sunsets and selfies anymore: the new Discover feature showcases quality, snackable content from reputable publishers, including CNN, Vice and National Geographic, on a daily basis.

Upon clicking into each publisher, users are delivered the most up-to-date photo and video content from around the world. Best of all, they can click-through to read or watch long-form layouts of the stories.

Essentially, “Discover” is an always-on channel, refreshed daily, serving up relevant content alongside brand advertisements.

Why this matters:

Snapchat has been able to pull together the key themes that have been on every marketing and media exec’s mind – video content, real-time news, news desk – to create a platform that incorporates all of them and is executed with simplicity and style.

In terms of advertising, Discover integrates brands further into the content than what is currently possible on Facebook and Twitter news feeds. Snapchat Discover debuts a new advertising model that is likely to be a significant source of revenue.

What this means for brands:

1. More visibility: Snapchat Discover is featured prominently within the application and ensures a Discover sponsorship generates more visibility than a brand’s Snapchat account.

2. Wider audience: the collaboration with publishers, such as Vice, Yahoo! News and CNN, extends Snapchat’s influence beyond their core millennial audience. This means Discover advertisers will reach a larger and more diverse audience.

3. Purpose-driven content marketing: brands can now be involved with Snapchat in a more useful, native and contextually relevant way.

4. Pay-to-play: the trend of social media becoming more intertwined with paid media continues. Brands will need to commit media spend to reap these additional benefits.

5. Brands as publishers: consumers continue to demand high quality content so the need for brands to act as publishers hasn’t disappeared. However, Snapchat Discover provides an alternative to brands needing to create the content themselves.

6. Digital Ecosystem: Snapchat has delivered a new paid media possibility to a brand’s digital ecosystem but, as with any new platform and tactic, a strategy needs to be developed to ensure it drives business value.