Snapchat's head of revenue operations says the company is planning to introduce behavioral ad targeting in Q3 2016
Snapchat is planning to introduce behavioral targeting for advertisers, the company's director of revenue operations Clement Xue revealed in an eMarketer report published earlier this week.
Context & Ripple Effects
Snapchat spent mid-2016 assembling the plumbing for a real ad business: the June rollout of Snap Ads Between Stories and an Ads API opened inventory to partners programmatically, and sources pointed to a scan-a-barcode-to-unlock sponsored content format expected in the fall.
Behavioral targeting, confirmed by director of revenue operations Clement Xue in an eMarketer report, is the layer that makes that plumbing valuable — without it, advertisers buying through the new API were limited to cruder audience definitions than what Facebook-era buyers expect.
First-order effects
- Advertisers buying Snapchat inventory gain the ability to aim campaigns at user behavior rather than placement alone, directly raising the value of the API-driven inventory opened up in June.
- Snap's own sales team loses its monopoly on sophisticated buys, since better targeting makes partner- and eventually self-serve channels viable for performance marketers.
Second-order effects
- Rivals selling youth-heavy social audiences face pressure to match behavioral granularity, turning targeting depth rather than reach into the competitive metric for Snap's demographic.
- Measurement and attribution vendors gain a larger addressable market as performance budgets follow targeting capability onto the platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the trajectory runs from API to behavioral targeting to self-serve tools — which is where it landed with the 2017 launch of Snapchat Ad Manager letting marketers buy targeted ads without Snap's sales team or partners.
- A platform that monetizes behavior rather than placement shifts ad economics toward whoever owns the user-action data, a structure that later formats like Promoted Stories and AR Trial Ads (debuted in late 2017) are built to feed.
The trend: Snapchat is methodically converting a sold-direct media property into a full-stack performance ad platform, with each 2016-2017 step — API, behavioral targeting, self-serve manager — removing one more dependency on its own sales force.