Dive Brief:
- Snapchat has hired Ali Rana as its head of audience and brand solutions, and Gunnard Johnson as its head of quantitative ads research, according to the Wall Street Journal.
- Rana spent 17 years at WPP’s Millward Brown, and Johnson came from Google where he served as advertising research director.
- Both hires directly address ad measurement, an area marketers have voiced concern about on the social messaging platform.
Dive Insight:
Marketers have flocked to Snapchat for its Millennial-heavy, highly-engaged audience, but routinely complained that the messaging app didn’t offer targeting and measurement options that competitors such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others gave advertisers.
Snapchat has made a number of recent moves to address the issues around advertising on the platform, including picking Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings to measure the audience of its 3V mobile ad units. It also announced a reworking of its advertising strategy that offers marketers more advertising and targeting opportunities. The two executive hires seem to be in line with Snapchat’s moves to become more marketing-friendly.
One change Snapchat is making to its advertising is taking more control over the Discover portal ad inventory. In this way, it can aggregate those audiences offering targeting options by age, gender, location and device type, as well as be able to offer advertisers larger audiences across multiple Discover channels.
