Snap has rolled out its Promoted Places ad format in the UK, with Nando’s as its inaugural sponsor.
The format is placed within Snapchat’s Snap Map, a personalised map where users can view where their friends are located, as well as local points of interest based on an account’s usage trends.
Snap claims the Map feature has more than 400m monthly active users globally — or about 40% of total monthly active users of Snapchat (932m).
The company had been testing the format in the US as early as October 2024, but the UK is its first international market launch.
Promoted Places will highlight “sponsored places of interest” (in this case, Nando’s restaurants) for those who use the map to check the locations of friends and family or view public stories posted nearby.
Users opening their map will see their nearest Nando’s signposted with the brand’s Barci cockerel logo. Clicking on logo pins prompts animations for Nando’s branding and products, such as its Peri-Peri chips, to float across users’ screens.
As part of the tie-up, Nando’s is hosting sponsored content on Snapchat’s Stories and Spotlight feeds. It has also invested in another format launched in May, Sponsored Snaps, which are messages that show up in users’ Chat feeds.
Analysis: Lower-funnel play
Both Promoted Places and Sponsored Snaps were previewed by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel last year as a way for Snapchat to position itself as a destination for performance advertising.
The launch of Promoted Places in the UK provides an additional lower-funnel opportunity for brands seeking to drive short-term impact through increased foot traffic at local shops. It also makes Snap a more direct commercial competitor to popular map apps such as Google and Apple.
As Snap UK senior commercial director Jake Thomas explained, this UK first “brings people’s digital and physical worlds even closer together, whilst allowing brands to enter the spaces that Snapchatters naturally spend their time”.
He suggested that the Nando’s campaign aims to make it “more fun and effortless” to meet up with friends in physical locations.
In its Q2 earnings announced earlier this month, Snap grew revenue by 9% year on year to $1.2bn, with Sponsored Snaps in particular highlighted as “proving highly effective in driving incremental conversions”.
During that quarter, Snapchat also launched Smart Campaign Solutions, a suite of offerings that seek to deliver “AI-powered performance and ease-of-use enhancements” for advertisers.
Snap pushes Chat as the ‘next frontier’ for performance marketing
