Why Instagram and Snapchat are sliding into your messages

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are taking a breather:

↗️ META: $7.95 CPM | ↘️ TIKTOK: $3.87 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $8.89 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• 🐦 Here’s what X TV looks like on your big screen

• Nerd party: Your need-to-know analytics updates 🤓

• 🤯 Roku’s new mind-blowing patent rumor

But first…

🗒️ Why Instagram and Snapchat are sliding into your messages

In the coming months, Snapchat will be adding “Sponsored Snaps” — which will appear in the chat inbox as a new Snap, although without a push notification. Opening the message is optional: think LinkedIn’s sponsored InMails. 

Meanwhile, Instagram is testing a new element of its Broadcast Channels, the one-to-many communication feature that allows creators to hit followers with content in the style of a DM. Some creators now have the option to turn on replies within a Broadcast Channel — effectively turning the feature into one giant group text. 

This is no coincidence. Both platforms are iterating to capitalize on changing user engagement patterns—they’re seeing users (especially younger users) respond more directly to conversation and one-to-one engagement.

We expect to see more of this: Next thing you know, they’ll be adding comments on Stories.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

📸 Instagram: Would you look at that? This just in: Instagram is rolling out comments on Stories — with the comments visible to all who are able to view a particular Story’s content. Why now? Well, because that’s where the eyeballs are. As IG chief Adam Mosseri likes to say, “friends post a lot more to Stories and send a lot more DMs than they post to [their IG] feed.” 

💡 This strategy also explains Instagram’s recent focus on Notes, another way the platform is trying to increase interaction and engagement—especially true among teens, who are reportedly are creating Notes at 10x the rate of non-teens. 

Here’s what comments on Stories looks like:

🔎 Google is bidding adieu to Video Action Campaigns (VAC). Instead, VAC will be merged into Demand Gen, which uses automation to create multi-format ads, text, images, and video depending on the placement—the ads then run across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. 

As part of the migration to Demand Gen, Google has also started placing the ads on video partners. For a timeline, Google says that beginning in March, advertisers won’t be able to create new VACs, and remaining VACs will be automatically transitioned to Demand Gen starting in April. 

According to Google, it’s a side-grade or better: “on average, advertisers who only run video ads with Demand Gen saw similar conversions to their Video Action Campaigns at a similar cost per action.”

🐦 After teasing its rollout months ago, Twitter/X has officially made the X TV app beta available on several app stores. The new app—which looks a lot like the YouTube TV app—“will soon be offering new ad options.”

🤯 Imagine your Smart TV could detect — regardless of what platform you’re watching — the moment when you pause whatever you’re watching. And then serve you a pause ad. That’s apparently what Roku is working on, according to media reports. The company is reportedly seeking a patent for “HDMI customized ad insertion,” which would—through a display device’s HDMI connection to a media device—determine when any kind of content is paused on a media device, and then proceed to display an advertisement. The tech may also be able to detect the context and the content of the media that has been paused and display customized ads.

Nerd party: Analytics news from Google, Snapchat 🤓 🎉

🔎 Good news for our fellow analytics nerds: GA4 has introduced Benchmarking Data, which helps you compare your site performance with other businesses in your industry. Couple things to keep in mind: 

• To be eligible for benchmarking data, your property must have the Modeling contributions & business insights setting enabled in Admin > Account Settings.

• The benchmarking summary shows: your trendline, the median in your peer group, and the range in your peer group 

🫰Since August 22, Snapchat Ads Manager switched to reporting on conversions based on Impression Time instead of Conversion Time using the 28/1 attribution window as a default. This setting can be changed by toggling the settings when you customize columns. 

⚠️ Buyer Beware: Ad Age researched whether the information data brokers—including Acxiom, Epsilon, and Experian—collect and share with marketers is actually worth the money. It turns out that a lot of the data marketers receive from such data brokers is wildly inaccurate—and when it’s not, it raises questions about whether brokers should be storing it.

🐘The Elephant In the Room: Our weekly office poll!

🚀 At some point in the past year or two, you’ve probably said to yourself: “Snapchat — wait, is that still a thing?” Not only a thing: Back and better than ever. So perhaps unsurprising that Snapchat—the comeback “we’re not a social media platform” platform—is leaning heavily into nostalgia by bringing back retro features we haven’t thought about since the early-2000s.

📊 Last edition’s poll results: Is "demure" the millennial response to "brat"?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yes 

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 No 

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Sir, do you have an extra Oasis ticket?

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

In the meantime, stay up to date with the latest performance marketing intelligence by following us on Linkedin, Instagram, and X.