“Mom’s Secret,” one of the many stories available on the chat fiction app Yarn, is actually sponsored by Skype. Unlike more traditional forms of content marketing or sponsored content, chat stories allow brands to embed themselves in the fictional narrative of the story, thus earning more brand exposure in the process. For example, brands that partner with Yarn can provide additional free access to stories for readers who haven’t subscribed to the app. “I had to put that in all caps because, in all my time in ad sales at Pandora & Shazam, we never had anyone thank us for ads. But because the [sponsoring] brand is adding value to the user, they love it, and happily watch the ad in exchange for another episode.” Picking partners Wondering if your brand could ever find success with a sponsored chat story? […] Skype was a natural fit because we already had video chatting in some of our stories. We are able to feature the Skype interface in certain stories, as well as create three new stories … and they just happened to include natural Skype behavior within them.” According to Szabo, 1.5 million users have read Skype’s sponsored stories thus far. Steven Abrahams of Skype told me he’d encourage any brands interested in trying out this kind of content marketing to consider which metrics they’re trying to drive and to determine how they’ll measure those metrics from content. Yarn’s partnerships with Dunkin’ Donuts and Skype signal the potential for sponsored chat stories, but chat stories are still in their infancy. A 2016 Contently study found that 54 percent of respondents had felt deceived by native advertising in the past, and 44 percent weren’t even able to identify the sponsoring brand.
After a brother and sister discover something mysterious about their parents, they start to investigate their own family. Eventually, they come to suspect that the clues they uncover may help find a missing woman from their neighborhood. This may sound like the plot of a new Netflix show, but believe it or not, it’s branded content.
“Mom’s Secret,” one of the many stories available on the chat fiction app Yarn, is actually sponsored by Skype. The structure is deceptively simple: Stories are formatted like text conversations between people. Think of it as the newest iteration of native advertising. Now, you might be wondering how Skype ties into a dark family melodrama. As the story progresses, the siblings communicate via Skype calls and share the video and images they discover through some of the platform’s features. It’s pretty typical product placement, yet because of the form, it doesn’t detract from the narrative that keeps readers engaged.
Unlike more traditional forms of content marketing or sponsored content, chat stories allow brands to embed themselves in the fictional narrative of the story, thus earning more brand exposure in the process. And it’s not just Yarn. Other apps like Hooked and Tap have rapidly become popular, especially with Gen-Z and millennials.
Chatting opportunities
With marketers continually on the hunt for a creative approach to brand awareness, chat story apps offer unique options for experimentation. Hooked crossed the 10-million user mark last year, and 69 percent of its readers fall between 18 and 24 years old.
User engagement with sponsored posts has been promising too. Skype’s first two chat stories (“Mom’s Secret” and “Still Searching”) have been viewed more than 5 million times on Yarn and boast a 6.3 percent click-through rate to the company site.
Yarn also partnered with Dunkin’ Donuts in 2017 to feature a story about teens afflicted by a curse that fully transforms them into the characters they dressed up as on Halloween night. The characters race around town to try to break the curse, eventually ending up in a Dunkin’ Donuts store where they encounter the one person with the power to end the spell. In addition to the standard chat format, the story also included multimedia elements like images and video. It became the most popular content on the app once released in addition to earning a…
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