Television giant Viacom and new media vanguard Snapchat have inked a multiyear advertising deal.
While the two companies have already partnered on Discover channels for Viacom-owned entities MTV and Comedy Central, the ad sales deal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, seeks to capitalize on each company’s varying strengths.
Now, Viacom, which also owns BET and Nickelodeon, will sell ads on Snapchat’s behalf as part of larger TV packages that can be purchased by major brands. Ads could appear within Live Stories, but not on the Discover pages of competing media companies.
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As part of the deal, Viacom will also add two more channels to Snapchat Discover, including a U.S. version of MTV and an international version of Comedy Central. Viacom, which reported “challenging” Q1 earnings today and saw the ascension of a new executive chairman Philippe Dauman last week — who “has taken an unusually granular interest in Snapchat,” according to the Journal — also said it would ramp up investment in Snapchat programming.
If Viacom stands to gain some of Snapchat’s cool cache through the deal, the ephemeral messaging app could receive a sales boost from Viacom, which boasts longstanding relationships with leading advertisers. Though Snapchat clocks an astronomic 7 billion video views per day and is a favored platform by young people today, it has been criticized for its expensive ad prices, unclear metrics and a lacking ad sales organization.
Snapchat will get a cut of the ads that Viacom sells, but the companies did not disclose terms of their revenue-sharing agreement.
