Snapchat can be easy to use to those that are fond of it. But for advertisers, things are rather different. It can be hard for one to create an advertisement on Snapchat.
First of all, Snapchat is insistence on vertical video that needed advertisers to create campaigns from scratch, rather than reusing their existing ads that ran elsewhere.
To address that inconvenience, Snapchat is rolling out a browse-based ad creation tool called Snap Publisher.
With the tool, advertisers with access to its self-serve ad buying tool, Snap Ad Manager, can use it to create vertical video Snap ads. So whether or not advertisers have any vertical videos available to use, the tool will take care of that.
Snapchat's vertical ads format aren't everyone's taste, and to many advertisers, Snapchat's vertical ads are odd. The automatic cropping tool is a simple feature, but could mean everything since it addresses one of the biggest obstacles to advertising on its platform.
Before Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube added support for vertical video to provide more scale for the format, brands need to produce an exclusively new ad for Snapchat or spend time cropping and editing vertical versions of their existing horizontal videos in a way that doesn’t make viewers feel like they're watching a regular video with the sides cut off. With Snap Publisher, Snapchat can crop and edit them automatically for them.
As an added benefit, there is also an option for them to pull photos or videos from websites.
According to Snapchat’s support page for Snap Publisher, advertisers "may only import from sites in which you have the legal right to obtain media from."
This however is only limited to certain websites. Snapchat’s ad approval team would have to recognize the visuals before approving the them to be included due to license issues.
Advertisers that want to create ads from scratch can use one of the 13 templates provided by Snapchat. They come with generic photos and videos that should appeal to the majority of its audience. Such as young people doing fun things, like blowing bubbles, looking at their phones, taking selfies and others.
The templates also feature placeholders for photos, videos, logos and text that advertisers can customize.
They can swap them with their own assets and change the sizes, locations, fonts and colors. The templates vary in features, from photo slideshows to videos that slide into call-to-action messages to ads that pan around or zoom in on a photo.
Then there is Snap Publisher's ability to set times for the ad to pan from one part of the frame to another or to zoom in/out. Advertisers could add their own "keyframes" that set what part of the video in in view, and for how long. The keyframes also make it easier for advertisers to use photos for their ads without making them feel like static images.
If the feature doesn't fit the advertisers' taste, they can opt-out of Snapchat's automated editing capabilities if they want to.