WeAre8 has partnered sell-side advertising company Magnite to power its mobile in-app ad product.
Magnite will serve as the social media challenger’s first supply-side platform (SSP), enabling advertisers to buy inventory on WeAre8 programmatically for the first time.
WeAre8 has a unique advertising model: users opt in to viewing ads via a specific ad-only feed within the app. Ads otherwise are not present on the platform.
To entice users to watch ads, 60% of the revenue generated from every impression is given back to consumers and they can choose to add it to a linked PayPal account or give the money to supported charities and non-profit organisations.
In order to receive payment, users are required to watch ads for their full duration, ensuring completion rates for advertisers. Brands can also ask survey questions of users after serving them ads.
“We are delighted to be giving more brands the opportunity to work with us by partnering with Magnite and also broadening our product range,” WeAre8’s UK managing director Laura Chase told The Media Leader.
“As we continue to scale globally and more money shifts back to people and planet with WeAre8, we have the opportunity to support incredible charities, solve big problems and get brands much better results along the way.”
Currently, the platform operates its own ad buying engine, “Sam-I” (Sustainable Ad Manager — Intelligence). Its hero ad product has thus far been bought on a cost-per-completed-view basis, but WeAre8 is now launching a “brand feed” to enable advertisers to buy programmatically via Magnite and buy based on CPMs instead.
On this week’s episode of The Media Leader Podcast, Chase explained that “people are used to buying and trading in a certain way on social platforms, so we’re moving into that space”.
She told The Media Leader that WeAre8 will also soon be launching a voice note ad product in time for less healthy food ad restrictions coming into force on 1 October, allowing brands to advertise to users without a video element in order to comply with the ban.
Despite WeAre8’s modest scale compared with the social giants (there are 1.6m monthly active users in the UK), Chase argued that the platform can offer greater effectiveness for advertisers than many of its competitors.
“There’s a fixation around giant reach numbers and very limited amounts of attention,” she said. “Our story is: reach verified, non-duplicated, actual humans. They watch your ad from start to finish, they like you a lot for showing up in this space and talking to them in this way, and purchase intent is way higher.”
As Chase explained, the company’s ad model is centred around “rewiring the economics” of advertising to “redirect billions of dollars back to people, publishers, planet and charities around the world”.
Magnite UK platforms lead Sophie Green added that the company is “proud” to be WeAre8’s first SSP, arguing that WeAre8’s mission “to make media more purposeful aligns perfectly with the growing demand from brands for more ethical, values-driven advertising”.
