The Telegraph, the U.K. publisher is hunting for its next phase of growth .Its branded content division Spark, is now turning towards platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Spark, now in its third year, continues to put print and online at the heart of the offering: The Telegraph has two newspapers, two magazines and one website, which is visited by 62,000,000 users every month.

However, the Group is battling declining profits, with pre-tax profit standing at just £13.7m in 2017, significantly down from £27.1m it brought home the year prior. But according to branded content platform Polar's research, publisher branded content revenue is growing by 40% year-on-year.

It turned to director of commercial content Jane Johnson, who joined the team last December, to find the next phase of growth within the Spark division and in her short time with the company she has been the force behind a major push onto third-party platforms.

“We basically had to teach ourselves how to do it. We talked a bit with Snapchat, [but] the developer work came from our side, and we had a designer who wanted to learn more so she learnt the basics over the weekend,” Johnson recently revealed.

The team’s first campaign was for Alzheimer's Research UK which used motion graphics of an orange disintegrating and enlisted the help of actor Bryan Cranston to demonstrate how Alzheimer's causes the brain to shrink.
“We have a really active Snapchat audience - when Harry married Meghan, there were 12 million pageviews - that’s absolutely huge and shows you the power The Telegraph has,” she said.

Johnson claimed Spark was also one of the first branded content publishers to experiment on Instagram. For example, one element of a Samsung campaign that centered on the topic of cybersecurity ran in Instagram.

She predicted that Instagram, along with its Stories feature, will become an integral part of Spark's campaigns for clients.Despite these experiment on relatively new platforms , Johnson said the approach to storytelling hasn't changed.