Ad Buyers Push Snapchat to Have Metrics Audited
Advertisers say they need data to help them justify shifting their budgets away from digital giants like Facebook and Google or more traditional vehicles like TV. Snap, which sells brands short video ads and location-linked overlays called “geofilters,” reported revenue of $404.5 million in 2016, a fraction of Facebook’s $27.6 billion in revenue.
Given the precedent set by the industry’s two dominant players, Google and Facebook, advertisers are pushing for several other large digital ad platforms—including Snapchat, Pinterest and Twitter—to subject their advertising data collection processes to more third-party scrutiny, ideally audits by the MRC.
“Certainly, there’ll be pressure on Snap, Twitter, Pinterest, any sort of closed-off, walled-garden platform,” said Mitchell Weinstein, senior vice president of ad operations at the media buying firm IPG. “We have clients that will walk away from sites that don’t offer independent metrics.”
Snap addressed the importance of third-party data vetting in its IPO filing, stating that “advertisers who were spending a lot of money on our products wanted verification that the advertisements they had purchased were actually delivered to our users.” That led Snapchat to partner with several third-party ad measurement firms.
Copy and paste this URL into your WordPress site to embed
Copy and paste this code into your site to embed