With the social network drawing close to its appearance at IAB Newfronts, being held in New York this week, Snapchat has announced a few new ad options that it plans to add to the app soon.

The new "First Story" offering seeks to allow advertisers to tap into Stories. The idea behind this is such that an ad partner will be able to guarantee their ad as the first shown between friend Stories in the app on any given day.
Snap says this premium placement option could reach over 50 million users, which will be a great opportunity to raise awareness for huge campaigns in the application.

Perhaps that feature will be best suited to movie launches and similar newsworthy releases, to command wider reach, carrying accordingly high prices. It might be a new factor in people's minds, though, in how much to spend to achieve maximum awareness with younger consumers.

Snapchat is also debuting ads in Spotlight, its TikTok-like feed of short videos in the app.
Spotlight ads will appear during snaps, giving another chance to be seen by Snapchatters in a high engagement surface.

Spotlight now has more than 350 million monthly active users-that's up 46% year-over-year-and short-form video is now the main entertainment component of the moment, especially among younger audiences.

That may make this an opportunity worth exploiting. Spotlight ads are coming to the app soon.

Another effort Snap is undertaking to make brands and creators more easily connect is through a new 'Snap Star Collab Studio' initiative that will find matches between creators and brands for campaigns.
According to the company, Snap

The Collab Studio will accelerate brand and Snap Star partnerships via managed service production, led by four founding partners-Studio71, Beeline by Brat TV, Influential, and Whalar. Here, an assigned team will help brands create and deliver sponsored Stories, as well as brand-specific ad creative, with Snap Stars. "
That should help brands create more natively platform-centric content-more of what's important and relevant to Snap's audience.

Snapchat also unveiled new sports deals, which means more sporting event participations.
"Major sports sponsorship packages will enable marketers to activate across Snapchat during some of the world's biggest sporting events. To complement NBCUniversal's coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and our Women's World Cup, we'll be bringing exclusive content to Snapchatters across Snapchat Stories, Spotlight, and Camera. Our existing partnerships with the WNBA, NBA, and NFL also remain in place for content across Stories and Spotlight as well as more creative tools for our community."

Conclusion - Finally, Snap also is in an early experimental phase for promoted links in chats through its My AI chatbot, which is powered by OpenAI.

It'll be similar to experiments Microsoft is running with Bing Chat experience. This would give yet another channel for brands to get their offerings into the chat. Ostensibly, this could also bias the accuracy of the chatbot itself through advertiser bias, but Snap says it will be designed to help ad partners reach users who've indicated potential interest in their offerings.

In broad strokes, the specifics are fuzzy, but the idea is pretty simple: with the reformulation of search through AI chat experiences, platforms are examining how to fit their core ad businesses into this new flow so that, when and if AI chat really becomes a larger factor, they and brand partners aren't left in the dust.

Quite interesting new considerations that actually can reshaped your approach to Snapchat ads and how you maximize reach and resonance with the Snap audience.