Snap Inc. (NYSE:SNAP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Brian Nowak: Thanks for taking my questions. Just to kind of go back to the ad disruption in the near-term kind of laid out on Page nine. I guess one of the questions I have maybe I’m just not really understanding it, is the way to think about this, the value of the advertisers is going up, because in the near-term, you’re sort of increasing the effective ad load. So we should think about platform wide pricing going down in the near-term. Is that right? Or am I sort of off there, is the first one. Then the second thing, one of the important aspects of driving direct response business and sort of data capture and being able to build cohorts of users? Can you just talk to us about some of the data capture that you already have and how you think about the potential to sort of cohort these users to drive a large DR business? Thanks.

Derek Andersen: Hey, Brian. It’s Derek speaking. I’ll take the first one. Just in terms of what we’re seeing in terms of inventory and the experience there, what you’re effectively seeing is we’ve had some growth of impressions just as we’ve invested in the creator stories product in particular, that’s been very popular, both from posting, and from an engagement perspective. And you’ve seen that contribute, sounds fairly an ad load is driven by positive engagement with their product. And then in terms of, what we’re seeing in sort of the overall ecosystem of the auction, what we’re doing here is using our inventory significantly more efficiently. And so that has the effect of actually returning impressions back into the auction, which have to be absorbed across other GDBs. And sort of puts downward pressure, all else being equal on the contestation and the auction.

And so, obviously, that increases the opportunity for ROAs and return for advertisers. And all else being equal, we’re seeing that do is translate into lower CPMs in the short-term. But the improvements that we’re making to the DR platform and translating into longer dwell times, lower bounce rates, and some of the metrics that have been shared with you. Short earlier, really are improving the value of the auctions we’re driving. And so that is more performative for the advertisers. So in the very near-term, this disruption comes through with the pressure on the supply and the disruption to the volumes that are being driven, but the value is clearly higher. And we can see that already coming through. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit more context on what’s happening in the sort of supply demand environment there.

I’ll turn it over to Jerry, for the second part of your question.

Jerry Hunter: Yes. Thanks, Derek. Brian, thanks for the question. Let me just give you a little about how we think about this data. So we have a bunch of ways that we’re collecting data. So conversion API, pixel, data cleanrooms. It’s like Evan talked about earlier, multi-party computation, scan and MMP. And all of these signals feed into our system and give us a better view of what’s happening with customers and conversions. Add to that the changes that we made to the Web View and to the ad format, so we get better signal about how our customers are interacting with our product. These all come together to train our ML. And that gives us better targeting over time. So the way we think about this is sort of a circle where there’s constantly information that’s coming in.