Snapchat might be every teenager’s favorite app for silly selfies, but the company is taking its business very seriously.
The Venice, Calif. Startup has hired two marketing measurement veterans to better show marketers how their money can show returns from Snapchat ads, the Wall Street Journal reported and Snapchat confirmed to Coins2Day. Though Snapchat has had ads for quite some time now, a common sentiment has been that it’s still difficult for marketers to see how their ad dollars are performing.
The company’s new head of audience and brand solutions is Ali Rana, who spent 17 years at Millward Brown, a marketing research firm owned by WPP. In his most recent role at the firm, he helped develop measurement methods and practices for new platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Snapchat has been working with Millward Brown and Nielsen on post-campaign studies for over a year, the company told Coins2Day.
Gunnard Johnson is joining Snapchat as its new head of quantitative ads research. Most recently, Johson was the advertising research director at Google (GOOGL), where he helped build research standards for brands to more easily compare advertising on YouTube versus traditional television.
Snapchat, which has more than 100 million daily active users, has been selling ads since October 2014, but it’s ad business is still evolving. Users are shown ads in a few different ways, including in Discover content (Snapchat’s hub for bite-size articles and media content), in Stories, and as sponsored lenses and geofilters (decorations for users’ photos and videos).
Recently, it reported began to work on a software tool to let advertisers more easily integrate into its ad platform, and has started to introduce app installs, à la Facebook (FB). It also inked a deal with Nielsen a few weeks ago for collect better data.