Back in October when Snapchat announced that it would start running ads within its popular mobile app, the company seemed extremely concerned about how their users would react, much to the chagrin of advertisers.
They even included a laid-back announcement to users about those ads in their company blog, telling them that, watch or don’t, it was “no biggie.”
Their first “Brand story” ad wasn’t exactly well-liked but, within two months, a new, second video replaced it in users “recent updates” feed and was, at least as far as Snapchat was concerned, better received.
Recently the company commissioned a survey by Millward Brown Digital asking users to compare the 1st and 2nd ad types and found out that users did indeed like them.
600 Snapshot users were surveyed, 300 who had seen an advertisement on Snapchat and 300 who had not (The 300 who had not seen a Snapchat ad were used as the “control” group.)
Frankly, the data and “results” from the survey weren’t exactly achieved following strict, scientific guidelines. While they did show that users remembered specific ads and were more likely to make a purchase because of them (albeit a small percentage), the way in which they went about performing their survey definitely leaves more than a little bit of doubt about the end results.
In fact, while the survey asked specifically whether or not a user liked the “Our Story” ads on Snapchat, they didn’t specifically ask users if they liked having ads on their Snapchat feed per-se, a noticeable and rather large play with semantics.
One thing is certain; Snapchat is going to be delivering more ads to users, whether they like them or not, because the ad revenue that they gain from having them there is simply too much to resist.