A Rocky Start to 2018
Back in February, Snapchat was the focus of every millennial and gen z conversation, but all for the wrong reasons. In November 2017, Snapchat announced that in an attempt to combat and clear their app of fake news, they would release a new update that separated the “social from the media.” Essentially, this meant that a friend’s content will appear on one screen, while subscription pages, celebrity, and advertiser’s content appear on a different one. This seemed like a user-friendly idea that Snapchat users would enjoy.
Unfortunately, as the update began to roll out in January and February of 2018, users were furious. People who had been using the app since its release in 2011, deleted the app without thinking twice. Facebook,Twitter and Instagram – Snapchat’s social media competitors – were flooded with outraged teens and young adults voicing their frustrations. They questioned if Snapchat would listen to their users and revert back to the old, beloved platform. “I wonder if @Snapchat are reading all these negative tweets and actually plan to do something about their shockingly bad update. I won’t be using it until it goes back to how it was #snapchat” The determination to get the old app back was so strong, over one million people signed a petition on change.org to reinstate the old app design.
A few days later, Snapchat users were once again disappointed when Snapchat CEO, Evan Spiegel, confirmed that Snapchat would not be changing the app back. At an event soon after the backlash began, Spiegel said, “We are excited about what we are seeing so far… Some of the complaints we are seeing are reinforcing our philosophy…” With confirmation that the app was not changing back, fans had no choice but to either adjust to or abandon the new app. Between Q1 and Q2, 3 million users chose the later, as Snapchat saw a massive decline in daily active users.
To many people, this seemed like a problem only for millennials and in this same assumption, the generation would either get over it or find a new app to use. However, this update caused many more problems than outraged young adults and now six months later, advertisers and Snapchat are seeing the negative effects of not understanding their audience.
Drastic Ad Revenue Decrease
On September 25, eMarketer drastically lowered its ad revenue projections for Snapchat in 2018. Last March the projections were released at 1.03 billion, which a few days ago, was lowered to $662.1 million. With this adjustment, Snapchat owns less than 1% of the digital ad market. For perspective, direct social media competitor, Facebook, owns 20.6%. Part of this decline in revenue stems from their new programmatic ad platform. In June, they released a self-service ad buying platform that brought in more advertisers but also, due to the automated effectiveness of programmatic, lowered the overall ad prices. However, that the new ad platform doesn’t hold sole responsibility for ad prices dropping. Many advertisers are seeing a drop in ROI because the size of Snapchat’s audience is decreasing. Advertisers won’t use Snapchat if they can’t ensure views and conversion – they will spend their digital dollars on other platforms. So, the question is, after the app’s rocky year, how will Snapchat face 2019? Will they implement change in hopes of remaining relevant or will they fall to the wayside like other once-loved platforms like MySpace and Vine?
A Peek Into Snapchat’s Future
If the last few weeks are any indication of where the app is headed, I predict Snapchat is going up. Earlier in the week, they announced a partnership with Amazon. Users can use the Snapchat camera to scan a product or barcode that then prompts an 
Amazon card with either that product or similar products they offer. Clicking on the card takes consumers to the Amazon App where they can make a purchase or continue browsing. They are slowly rolling this feature out to users and I foresee this update will receive much more positive acceptance than that of the update earlier in the year. From an advertising perspective, as Snapchat is hoping to gain back some of its lost revenue and market share, partnering with Amazon, a company very committed to increasing and refining its advertising, this is the perfect move (read more about Amazon’s advertising changes here).
In the last few months of 2018, we will have to wait to see if Snapchat is able to gain back some of its lost advertising momentum. Incorporating user friendly features, such as the Amazon partnership, puts focus back on the user – something that Snapchat didn’t consider earlier in the year. Hopefully they continue with this focus on their user experience and remain one of the players in the digital advertising game.
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Erich joined in stating that blockchain is going to solve everything. Through all the issues that ad tech and digital marketing face, the consumer is the victim. Blockchain is in its infancy, people are talking and trying to figure out what they think. The companies who are quickly and aggressively creating a solution are a mess because it is such an early start. However, from this mess, applications that answer some of these questions will emerge, some taking longer than others. 
Erich jumped off of Dave’s point to say that there are people making more money than they should because the inefficiency is bigger than it should be. There are structural imbalances, frauds in the marketplace, vendors of dubious value and people are unclear what the contribution to the value actually is. We are in need of a mechanism to go deeper into the ad impression and see what the vendors are doing to the plan. Doing this would add a lot of value because as of now, lots of people are profiting but not off the right denominator. 
organizations have a process where they sit in front of a media planner and select where they want to provide orders. There is a great deal of buying that happens quite transactionally. So, there is clarity, reporting and accountability in this process that can be taken and applied to blockchain. This could provide an intermittent step in showing the value in accountability for traditional media buying. At the impression level however, this is much more interesting as there are 12+ companies involved in each impression served to a consumer. He concluded stating that the analog way of buying is not going to last throughout our lifetime. 
Dave explained that people often mix the technology of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency can ride on top of blockchain and utilize it; there would not be blockcahin without cryptocurrency, but you don’t need cryptocurrency to validate it. Cryptocurrency can have nothing to do with the payments. He then used the example of 
There is much to get excited about regarding blockchain. Although still at the beginning stages of development, adoption and acceptance, there is so much to be learned and gained from its adoption. A world 
David from Vulcan was the first to answer this question. For him from all the buzzwords 
I get the idea of a CXO started Adam, I get it, but it’s also what a CMO is responsible for. The CXO is somewhat driven by Silicon Valley startups as an anti-marketing thing, that they don’t need to invest in marketing, and that their companies and products can be successful without spending money on marketing. The need to focus on that overall experience, thinking about it holistically as a cross channel experience is a big shift. With the 5000 ad-tech partners there is no excuse not to present a better experience for the consumer.
Sharon said that they are trying to be very focused on what is driving that actual subscription. Their AI team is developing a subscriber influence score; they want to know what story or email they read before they subscribed. Building their own scoring system and own analytics so that they can answer one simple question: ‘what influenced that consumer to subscribe?’ 
There has been no pullback from social at all, even during the Zuckerberg trial, answered Sharon. So yes, she thinks people will continue to invest in social. David said that when social platforms first launched they brought together people that weren’t able to connect. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, are all free and nothing in America is free. People are going to remember that, so how do we keep it free, the benefits for the consumers will outweigh the data privacy issues. Adam thinks that eventually the pressure for data privacy will decrease as brands get more slack for data breaches. Facebook made a bunch of unrelated changes to their platform after their data scandal and people seemed ok with that.
The programmatic buying model where if your bid wins, you pay $0.01 above the second highest bid in the auction. In this type of auction, it is in your best interest to bid the highest amount you are willing to pay to win that impression, knowing that you will most likely end up paying less than that amount.
Our marketing teams have the dollars, started Jonathon, we develop the media strategy but the IO’s come out of the agencies. We benefit by receiving data from our agencies that come into our cloud as outbound data. Everything’s piped back in house which is helpful, because the people at the agency and those of us at Turner aren’t within the same 4 walls every day to examine how to best leverage all data we receive. The ownership is all held within Turner and then we execute it within the brand. For Sean they have been using a hybrid model for a number of years. We buy some media but our agency does it at scale. They are focused on maintaining that model, they don’t plan to cross over into that space. The goal is to simplify media buying for our hotels and take the burden off them so they can focus on operating and delivering exceptional guest experiences. They know that they have experts that can manage it. At Equifax, Joella said that they have a very close relationship with their agency. They transact with complete transparency and because of security they own all of their contracts. Because of the verticals that they deal with, they own the contracts, but work with their agency to develop the strategies and are at each others offices multiple times a week. She likes that the agency works with multiple clients and draws from that experience so they can help you pivot and you can rely on their network to get there.
Joella started by saying that they do set a budget at the beginning of the year, but then they look at the data everyday, so that they can move budget between channels and countries. The budgets get laid out but they are very fluid, they look at the data daily for high level results and then weekly for deep insights. The way we move money around is not common and very smart. We’re able to take our data in such real time and make these really smart efficient decisions in that month that might not make the most sense in the next month based on where the credit market’s going. Having data at your fingertips and moving it to drive the best revenue is great. Jonathon’s challenge is that he doesn’t know who’s going to watch, they have no idea. They still care about buzz in the marketplace sot they still have to spray and pray to have the full brand experience. For product it’s still very DR focused. Sean is managing 1700 individual interests and they manage those budgets like they are their own. They are looking at their budgets on daily basis especially on a meta search basis, they don’t have large budgets, especially the cheaper hotels but have to treat them like they have large budgets.
Meredith started by saying that following the customer journey is really important to them, how people are engaging and when during the day, so that they can engage people when it’s relevant to them, it’s on their roadmap to solve. Seth’s goal is to build modular creative, hundreds of creative! For him the next level is on the execution side, “my first matzo ball out there, traditional metrics are terrible predictors, likes, comments, etc. has nothing to do whether they like the show,” it comes down to tracking attribution, and weighing each touch for attribution. For Lisa geolocation tracking is really important, knowing what people are doing and where, so that we know when to reach them. Lastly for David, he wants to measure what tools are most effective and when the optimal time to use them is.