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Oh Snap: Will this become Gen-Z’s favorite social ad?

Plus: TikTok has returned to the app stores

Author

Gupta Media
February 14, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Today’s Social Media advertising rates belatedly saw their shadow:

↗️ META: $7.69 CPM | ↘️ TIKTOK: $3.48 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $8.72 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

  • ⏰ TikTok is back in the app stores

  • Are you pro-SNARF or anti-SNARF? ↗️

  • 📺 YouTube just hit a major, major milestone 

But first…

👻 Oh, Snap: Will this become Gen-Z’s new favorite social ad?

Snapchat is rolling out a new ad type: Sponsored Snaps. Previously available in closed alpha (as we told you last fall), they started to become more widely available to advertisers who are optimizing using a pixel as of last week. 

  • There’s no current timeline for Sponsored Snaps to become available for non-pixel advertisers, but we have heard it should roll out more widely this year. 

  • Regardless of their optimization tactic, all advertisers can currently book a 100% share-of-voice, one-day Sponsored Snap takeover—but it comes with a high (think low 7-figures) price tag in the US at this time.

Here’s Snap’s sneak peak at how these work:

🤳 Also rolling out to general audiences this quarter: Snapchat’s “engaged video view” tactic, similar to the goal we have been able to previously select on TikTok:

💸 Meanwhile, Snapchat’s Q4 2024 reporting showed some mixed signals. The platform added 10 million users globally in Q4, but lost net users in the U.S.—even as it beat expectations on revenue. 

  • How is that possible? The TL;DR: Snapchat’s ad business is booming.

  • That’s good news in the short term, right? Yes, but it’s concerning in the long-term if Snap can’t reverse the trend of attracting users here. 

  • What could turn things around? How about a “groundbreaking AI text-to-image model for mobile devices?” 🧐 Stay tuned.

↗️ BuzzFeed is creating its own social media platform that it hopes will be the antidote to addictive social media feeds that optimize for a strong, often negative, emotional response. The new app, BF Island, will begin as a private beta this year, and you can sign up here. Will it become a legitimate player among the social networks or turn out to be just another news app? 

Time will tell. Regardless, we’re 💯 in on Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti’s new acronym: SNARF. In his anti-SNARF manifesto accompanying the announcement of BF Island, Peretti defines SNARF content—that is, content which optimizes for “stakes, novelty, anger, retention, and fear”—as the new enemy of the people. Peretti claims that we’re entering a new phase in which there’s “tremendous pressure for all platforms to allow the free flow of SNARF content,” but that BF Island is being “built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression.” 

👽 Reddit is rolling out a new capability that allows advertisers to import campaigns directly from other platforms like Meta:

♾️ We’re not excited to learn about these 3 features that Meta is removing:

Existing customer budget cap—which allowed Advantage+ shopping campaign advertisers to limit or choose whether or not to spend on existing customers—is no longer available. Instead, Meta recommends that you either: 

  • …create a manual sales campaign with an ad set that excludes the custom audiences that represent your existing customers, OR

  • …create a manual sales campaign with two separate ad sets, each using original audiences. One ad set only targets your existing customers. The other ad set targets broadly while excluding your customers.

Unfortunately, Meta is also removing Audience Types from Advantage+ catalog campaigns. Moving forward, you’ll need to create catalog custom audiences and can include or exclude them at the ad set level.

Finally, Meta has also ended the ability to blocklist ad preview thumbnails from showing up in headlines:

💾 Microsoft: One of the big advantages of Microsoft’s ad network has been the ability for its ad products—Microsoft Audience Network, Shopping Campaigns, and Dynamic Search Ads among them—to tap into LinkedIn’s member data. Now Microsoft is adding LinkedIn member data to its AI-automated ad product, Performance Max (not to be confused with the Google product of the same name). And that’s just one of several updates coming to Performance Max: 

🚀 LinkedIn Profile Targeting: Now live in six major markets (U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, France, Germany), you can layer in LinkedIn’s professional targeting (company, industry, job function) as an audience signal.

📊 Better Reporting: Want deeper audience insights? You’ll now get performance by audience segment and be able to track individual asset performance.

🎯 Smarter Conversion Value Rules: Advertisers can now tweak conversion values in real-time based on business-specific factors (e.g., location, device type). 

🆕 New Customer Acquisition Goal: A fresh targeting option lets you boost bids for new customers or go all-in on acquiring only new users. It’s still in pilot, but could be useful for brands chasing growth.

⏰ Late last night, TikTok returned to the Google and Apple app stores for the first time since the Supreme Court upheld a U.S. ban on the app. Both companies reportedly received a letter from new Attorney General Pam Bondi indicating that they would not be prosecuted for violating the law. 

That decision, as the New York Times reports today, is good for TikTok but potentially bad for democracy: “TikTok’s return to the app stores means it is now back to operating as it always did in the United States,” the Times notes. “That has raised questions about whether Mr. Trump is abiding by the rule of law or putting executive power first, with some experts saying that conflict represents the beginnings of a constitutional crisis.” 

💸 The latest update on potential buyers for TikTok, according to Social Media Today:

  • Oracle is still in

  • Amazon is newly in

  • Microsoft is back in

  • Elon Musk is out

❗ Back in December, we shared that TikTok was testing a new feature that lets you bulk download ad preview QR codes or URLs into an Excel file for easy sharing. Ad Preview QR Code is now fully available, and Ad Preview URL is available for all objectives except for Product Sales—which is expected by the end of Q1 ‘25.

📺 It finally happened: In the U.S., we now watch more YouTube on TVs than on any other devices—including desktop and mobile. The CTV revolution has arrived.

🔥 HOT TIP: When setting up a 🔎 Google Promotion Extension, keep in mind that the start/end dates that you select under “Displayed Promotion Dates” don’t determine when the extension is able to show in search results. Instead, they show the flight of your promotion in search results, even if it hasn’t started yet. To schedule your Promotion Extension to only run during a specific window, go to Advanced Options >> Asset Scheduling, like so:

🐘The Elephant In the Room: Our weekly office poll!

Which advertisers won the Super Bowl? And the nominees are….

Pick your fighter:

Which advertiser won this year's Super Bowl?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

📊 Last edition’s poll results: If you had $7 million to spend on Super Bowl advertising, which would you rather? 

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 30-second Super Bowl TV ad  

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 1.35 billion TikTok impressions 

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 1.6 billion Instagram Reels impressions 

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 214 million impressions on Amazon Prime Video

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 10 million clicks on Walmart Connect 

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 700 million impressions on Spotify

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

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