Snapchat. Recently, they’ve been injecting ads into their stories (these clips are on average about 10 seconds). A few things I found interesting about the implementation and observing others interactions with the ads:
1) At being 10 seconds, the ads are relatively short and contextually relevant. They flow more naturally in the stories than a television ad in linear programming. There’s likely strict quality control being enforced by Snapchat. It will be interesting to see them scale this.
2) As a user progresses further along in a story, does a user become more invested in the story (this is a thread of related snaps that Snapchat curates) or are they more likely to bounce before the end. In television, you’ve got the hook of the narrative keeping the user until the end. That would dictate ad placement. Recently Snapchat has done something interesting to combat this: giving the user different story paths to go into (from a given story point).
3) Most importantly, as a user, you’re able to skip the advertisements if you want (and go on with the story). This creates a pressure on the advertiser to create engaging and contextually relevant ads. The feedback of length of time played, number of times skipped, etc all create signals on creative performance (historically difficult to judge on television as it’s not an interactive medium).
This is markedly different from the typical television advertisement. There’s the element of engagement of the user (skip or stay), the constrained view time, and constraint of being relevant to the surrounding content. This creates a competitive pressure that television ads haven’t faced.
Edit: This isn't to say that Snapchat is final platform for this medium of advertisements. These learnings (and more) will likely be applied to most social networks that enforce constraints on short-form video advertisements.