*Breaking* @Snap blames @Apple privacy changes for Q3 earnings miss and says Q4 revenues will come in between $1.16bn and $1.2bn, versus consensus estimate of $1.4bn.
*a Thread*
Chief executive Evan Spiegel says: "the new Apple-provided measurement solution did not scale as we had expected, making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS."
Snap chief of business Jeremi Gorman dismissed Apple's tool (SKAdNetwork), calling it "unreliable as a standalone measurement solution." He said measurements "diverge meaningfully from the results we observed on (other measurement solutions)."
How ads were working, and on which audiences, used to be real time and granular, but on iOS it is now delayed up to 72 hours and only available in the aggregate. This has transformed much of the tailored ads industry into something more like a traditional billboard.
As a result, some advertisers are throwing more money at “safe havens” where granular details are still available — namely on Android and Apple Search Ads.
Snap’s logic echoes what Facebook said a month ago when it informed advertising clients that it had “gotten harder to measure (the effectiveness of ad) campaigns on our platform” and said that many businesses were experiencing a “greater impact” than expected from Apple’s changes
Facebook, like Snap, did not say advertisements were actually performing any worse, but it conceded it had become difficult to model conversions accurately and it estimated it was “underreporting iOS web conversions by approximately 15 per cent.”
The upshot is that Snap will need to rebuild its ad infrastructure. Spiegel said the group is “working on building flexible first-party tooling and measurement solutions.” This suggests Snap will rely less on Apple’s SKAdNetwork.
Snap shares: -25%!
*ahem* she said. My bad.
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First Snap question is about Apple.... Wants to know if it'll take a quarter, multiple quarters or years to set a new-normal:
"This has definitely been a frustrating setback for us," @evanspiegel says.
1/?
"With these new Apple changes, those tools were essentially rendered blind," @evanspiegel says. "You can only really measure your advertising results using the success parameters that Apple's already defined. The reporting is delayed for a significant period of time ...
and (it's) often unavailable if you don't hit a certain threshold of conversion. Very hard to see performance on a creative level...
So what we've done is built our own solution called Advanced Conversions that allows people to do much more sophisticated things.
🚨 Breaking 🚨 Scoop - @Activision tells all employees it has fired 20 people, reprimanded 20 more and will triple investments into training resources as it tries to clean up culture following allegations of pervasive sexual misconduct, gender pay disparity and more.
*Thread*
Frances Townsend, compliance chief, tells @FT:
“It doesn’t matter what your rank is, what your job is. If you’ve committed some sort of misconduct or you’re a leader who has tolerated a culture that is not consistent with our values, we’re going to take action."
Back in August, hundreds of Activision Blizzard workers walked out in protest after management dismissed a California state lawsuit describing a “pervasive ‘frat boy’ workplace culture” as “irresponsible” and “inaccurate”.
@Apple’s advertising business has more than tripled its market share in the six months after it introduced privacy changes to iPhones that obstructed rivals, including @Facebook and @Google, from targeting ads at consumers.
*A Thread*
Search Ads now drives 58% of all iOS app installations that can be tied back to paid ads, according to @Branch, whose basket of data comprises 250 major apps including BuzzFeed, Instacart, Strava and Starbucks. That’s more than three times its 17% share a year ago
What has made Search Ads suddenly attractive is not any new feature but the fact that Apple has rendered the rest of the ad industry “blind” in the iOS universe, says @kochavaofficial, whose own data has Search Ads up 69% since June, while rivals are down 43%(!) on average.
Obtained documents from Tencent explaining how CAID and QAID work. The reason for its own IDFA solution, per someone familiar, is WeChat is big enough to do this on its own -- 1.2bn users. It doesn't need the China Ad Association.
It's taken me a while to understand this but @Facebook is unlikely to be hurt by Apple's move. Yes, they need to rebuild their ad infrastructure b/c attribution becomes difficult, but 1st-party data now becomes paramount. Facebook has 2.7bn users. They will thrive.