Snapchat Rolls Out Ad Targeting; IBM Markets To Developers

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Crawl, Walk, Run

Snapchat didn’t want to be “creepy” about its targeting tactics, but advertisers wanted more relevancy on the platform. So the messaging company is rolling out three new ad targeting products, reports Mike Shields of The Wall Street Journal. The first, Snap Audience Match, will allow marketers to match their first-party data anonymously with Snapchat user data. Consumers can opt out of this product. Snapchat Lifestyle Categories will allow brands to target people who consume certain categories of video on Snapchat, and Lookalikes will allow advertisers to target Snapchat users with similar behaviors as their audience. The products are fairly standard for media platforms, but they show that baby Snapchat is entering adulthood (or at least its teens). More.

The Lord Giveth

IBM is going for the CMO by way of developers, Chief Digital Officer Bob Lord told George Slefo of Ad Age. Developers have the ears of CMOs and CIOs when it comes to tech recommendations, but they don’t necessarily think of IBM as a provider of cloud-based services. “I think the perception of the marketplace is we’re not as accessible but we should be and we are accessible,” Lord said. “We have the tools, and they are very accessible, but the challenge I have right now is educating the developer community on how Watson can help them achieve that.” More.

Unrealized Potential

We’re still a few years out from true cross-channel, real-time marketing, said Krux VP Chris O’Hara in an AdExchanger column. But that future is here now (in limited form), writes Rocket Fuel CTO Mark Torrance in a LinkedIn rebuttal. For instance, via integrations with DMPs such as Adobe Audience Manager, Oracle Data Cloud and Krux, Rocket Fuel sees audience segments as fast as the DMP processes the data. “It’s true this can sometimes be slower than real-time, but when that happens it is due to tech limitations of the DMP or its data acquisition pipeline, not the DSP,” writes Torrance.

Welcome To The Show

Twitter’s rights to live stream and distribute an upcoming Bills-Jets game represents a chance to “rekindle the promise of Twitter’s first several years,” writes Fast Company. Twitter signed deals with the NBA, MLB and NHL this summer, but its NFL streaming results will be the first and most important indicator of whether the social platform can transform into a live, broadcastesque marketing channel. If Twitter can’t effectively distribute and monetize NFL content, other sports probably won’t bring the revival it needs. More.

Targeting Comeuppance?

“What seemed to be the wastefulness of TV was in fact its secret sauce,” Ian Leslie claims in a column for the Financial Times. Leslie sees a backlash against the obsession with micro-segmenting digital audiences. If there is a tide of sentiment against targeting, Marc Pritchard’s recent comments to CMO Today suggest the company will back away from highly targeted Facebook campaigns, preferring scale. More. File under “tempest in a teapot.”