A spokesperson of Snap, the parent company of one of the leading photo sharing applications, Snapchat recently announced that the company had acquired the location analytics firm named Placed. While there is no official announcement from Snap about how much they have paid for the acquisition, Bloomberg reported that Snap had paid $125 million. Placed is a company, which essentially measures store visits and offline revenue that are generated by digital, out-of-home ads and TV.
One of the leading advertisers in the world like Procter & Gamble and Unilever are putting a tremendous amount of pressure on the digital ad space sellers like Google, Facebook and Snapchat to prove that the money spent by the brands on advertisement increases the brand’s sales. Consequently, the global leaders are increasing their spending to improve their measurement capabilities for measuring the sales results from the digital ads.
Earlier this year, in April, Snapcaht started rolling out an in-house online-to-offline measurement product, which was called Snap to Store. The product enabled Snapchat to detect users using the app in a marketer-specific location such as restaurant, cinema hall or a store and subsequently check if the user has served any ads of that brand on Snapchat previously.
With the acquisition of Placed by Snap, Snapchat is only trying to reinforce that it has been offering this type of ad attribution since 2011.
Placed has its own set of unique audience who opt to share their location with Placed plus, which is a third-party audience. By constantly tracking the people’s location and cross-verifying the information with their database of businesses’ location and operating hours, the company estimates where the person is likely to be at a certain time, and then it accordingly deals with the ad buyers DigitalsLBi, Essence Digital, and IPG Mediabrands and ad sellers like Hearst, Pandora, The Weather Company and Conde Nast.
Last year, Placed has measured more than $500 million in media spend to store visits across several campaigns and partners. David Shim, the CEO of Placed, in a blog post published on 5th June, 2017 announced the deal. He also said that Placed would continue to function as a separate company and will retain all of its employees with him reporting to the Imran Khan, the chief strategy officer of Snap. With Snap buying Placed, the advertisers will now be able to use Placed to keep track of their store visits and offline revenue coming from their ads running on Snapchat.
