I take issue with this. An ad for Deoderant spliced into the middle of my friend's feed is not contextually relevant. The list of "suggested feeds" aka ads they shoved into the top of the client are not contextually relevant.
It's difficult for their ads to be on target for anything other than their promoted feeds. Video is not search.
Given that a small number of companies are responsible for a large proportion of brand advertising spend, I would posit that it isn't too difficult to scale quality control if you focus on building relationships exclusively with heavy spenders. Quality control becomes a bottleneck at the long tail end of the market, where ad budget per creative is much smaller. At the top end, you can behave like a TV channel and reuse established quality control practices. If you have 100m+ active users and a video-heavy medium, this shouldn't be impossible to accomplish.
That said, I have heard several reports about Snapchat's eagerness to build programmatic ad expertise, which (in the context of this discussion) may pointing to one of the following possibilities:
1. Large brands are not exhibiting TV-style buying behaviour (i.e. large upfront buys) on Snapchat. This would make sense as it mirrors trends in the rest of the industry. If you, as the buyer, have access to technology that lets you better control and manage your spend, gather intelligence, and understand ROI, then why wouldn't you? This is the buying mechanism that programmatic technology enables, and its more or less incompatible with TV-style upfront buys.
2. Snapchat wants to open their doors to mid-market and long tail advertisers. The goal might be to boost spending, drive up prices, or to go after performance advertising dollars. If I were a Snapchat investor, I'd find this second scenario slightly worrying, as quality control becomes very very difficult.
How do you see their recent policy updates[1] in this context?
[1] http://marketingland.com/snapchat-changed-terms-service-priv...
It might be that they want to pass this ID into programmatic platforms. Some systems treat them as pseudo-cookies for frequency capping, measurement, and basic targeting.
Snapchat. Recently, they’ve been injecting ads into their stories (these clips are on average about 10 seconds). A few things I found interesting about the implementation and observing others interactions with the ads:
1) At being 10 seconds, the ads are relatively short and contextually relevant. They flow more naturally in the stories than a television ad in linear programming. There’s likely strict quality control being enforced by Snapchat. It will be interesting to see them scale this.
2) As a user progresses further along in a story, does a user become more invested in the story (this is a thread of related snaps that Snapchat curates) or are they more likely to bounce before the end. In television, you’ve got the hook of the narrative keeping the user until the end. That would dictate ad placement. Recently Snapchat has done something interesting to combat this: giving the user different story paths to go into (from a given story point).
3) Most importantly, as a user, you’re able to skip the advertisements if you want (and go on with the story). This creates a pressure on the advertiser to create engaging and contextually relevant ads. The feedback of length of time played, number of times skipped, etc all create signals on creative performance (historically difficult to judge on television as it’s not an interactive medium).
This is markedly different from the typical television advertisement. There’s the element of engagement of the user (skip or stay), the constrained view time, and constraint of being relevant to the surrounding content. This creates a competitive pressure that television ads haven’t faced.
Edit: This isn't to say that Snapchat is final platform for this medium of advertisements. These learnings (and more) will likely be applied to most social networks that enforce constraints on short-form video advertisements.