Dive Brief:

• Snapchat has made a small change to its user privacy policy that should have a big impact on advertising on the platform.
• In a section on what Snapchat can use customer data for, which included suggesting friends or profile information and customizing content, the section now ends with “including ads.”
• Marketers have long-complained about the lack of targeting on Snapchat compared to other social media platforms, and it seems very possible that the user policy had been holding Snapchat back from providing the granular targeting marketers are used to with other platforms such as Facebook ads.

Dive Insight:

Snapchat offers targeting by age, gender and location, but those are very broad data points compared to the highly-detailed user data that Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms offer marketers.

Jeanne Bright, vp of social at DigitasLBi, told Digiday, “All you can target so far has been geotargeting and age targeting, but age targeting only started this year in a main way. So if they would allow us to do better targeting, then that would increase their parity with other networks.”

Snapchat didn’t comment on the user policy change, but it did provide insight into its stance on advertising on a webpage about privacy, “We don’t want to serve ads that are so custom-tailored that they feel invasive or uncomfortable. It’s a difficult balance and we may not always get it right, so we are counting on Snapchatters for feedback.”