Snap hires ex-Google VP to boost ad targeting and measurement

Snap Inc announced yesterday that it has appointed a new senior vice president of engineering from Google, marking the latest addition to its team in a bid to boost its advertising business. Eric Young, who previously served as vice president of engineering for Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud, will be responsible for overseeing Snap’s core infrastructure, which includes the widely-used photo messaging app Snapchat.

In addition to managing the infrastructure, Young will spearhead efforts to enhance Snap’s ad targeting and measurement capabilities on Snapchat, a task made more challenging by recent privacy updates on Apple’s iOS devices. Despite consistently increasing its user base for Snapchat, now boasting 750 million monthly users, Snap has faced difficulties in generating revenue at a comparable rate.

In April, Snap announced plans to streamline user interactions with ads and improve ad relevance, which it acknowledged had negatively impacted some advertisers in the short term. During his time at Google, Young contributed to the development of the tech infrastructure for products such as search, ads, and YouTube.

Young’s appointment at Snap follows the recent hiring of Rob Wilk, former head of advertising at Microsoft Corp, as president of the Americas region, as well as another Google executive to lead revenue product, reports Channel News Asia.

A month ago, a well-known computer scientist, also referred to as “the godfather of artificial intelligence,” resigned from Google. He wanted to leave Google to tell his concerns about the potential dangers of the technology, according to US media reports. His name is Geoffrey Hinton and he told The New York Times that this continuous development in technology could have “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The intense competition between technology giants is pushing companies to create new AI technologies at a fast pace and these new technologies might harm jobs and continue misinformation. He added, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.” For more information, click the LINK to read.