For a few years now, advertising on Snapchat using video was kind of a pain in the neck.
In terms of user experience, vertical video is a no-go on Facebook and Youtube.
But on Snapchat, it's a must.
This left marketers needing to create brand new content especially for Snapchat, or to spend a bunch of time or money cropping their existing videos.
Fortunately for brands that rely on Snapchat as a key part of their marketing strategy, the platform recently added a brand new tool that makes it a lot easier to create and edit branded video content especially for Snapchat.
It's called Snapchat Publisher.
Snapchat Publisher can automatically convert horizontal videos to a vertical format, including determining where focal points lie and when the camera should pan from one viewpoint to another.
They've also got a selection of prefab templates you can choose from, providing an easy “plug-and-play” method for advertising on Snapchat.
A recent article from Marketing Land details what Snap Publisher does, and why it's so helpful for social media marketers.
On Monday [July 17, 2017], Snapchat officially rolled out a browser-based ad creation tool, Snap Publisher, that anyone with access to its self-serve ad-buying tool, Snap Ad Manager, can use to create Snapchat’s vertical video Snap Ads, whether or not they have any vertical videos to use.
Snap Publisher enables advertisers to automatically turn any photo or video, including the horizontal kind, into a vertical video ad.
To make things easier, it also has an option for brands to pull photos and videos from their websites.
If an advertiser doesn’t have any existing videos or photos — or at least not any that might appeal to Snapchat’s “cool kid” audience — brands can use one of 13 templates provided by Snapchat that come complete with generic photos and videos of young people doing young-people things like blowing bubbles, looking at their phone, taking selfies and walking down stairs.
[image source: Marketing Land]
Snap Publisher’s most important feature appears to be its automatic cropping tool.
This is how Snapchat can address one of the biggest obstacles to advertising on its app.
For years, advertisers have wrestled with adopting Snapchat’s vertical video format.
Before Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube added support for vertical video to provide more scale for the format, brands either had to produce all-new videos exclusively 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.
Now Snapchat will do that cropping and editing for them.
Brands can choose to have Snapchat’s computer-vision technology figure out how best to convert a horizontal video into a vertical one.
If advertisers don’t like Snapchat’s automated edits, they can choose to adjust them or to delete them and make their own.
Snap Publisher features 13 templates designed to make creating a Snap Ad as plug-and-play as possible.
The templates feature placeholders for photos, videos, logos and text that advertisers can customize to their liking, swapping in their own assets and changing 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.
You can learn more about using Snapchat's new self-serve ad tool over at Marketing Land.
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