Our last piece on Snap triggered more feedback than we expected. Not polite nodding. Not quiet agreement. Actual pushback, side emails, Slack messages that started with “I think you’re half right, but…” which is usually how you know you touched something structural.

So we decided to go further. Not another “Snap is underrated” take. Not a defense brief. A real investigation into what Snap’s existence implies about how media planning, measurement, and value actually work now.

Because the more you look at Snap closely, the harder it becomes to treat it as just another social app. And the easier it becomes to see it as something more unsettling: a live prototype of post-feed advertising economics.

This is not a story about features. It’s a story about architecture.

Most media conversations still start with a category error.
Snap gets placed next to Meta and TikTok, filed under “social,” then evaluated using feed-era assumptions it never agreed to.

That framing misses the point.

Snap is not trying to win feeds. It largely opted out of that war years ago. What it built instead was a system organized around camera entry, private communication, and participation-first interaction. Ads don’t interrupt attention there. They borrow it, extend it, sometimes even become tools inside it.

That makes Snap less a channel and more a reference design. A working example of what happens when media stops pricing exposure and starts pricing time spent doing something.

Once you see that, the question stops being “How do we plan Snap?”
It becomes “Why are we still planning everything else like feeds?”

Here’s the core thesis most people nod at but don’t finish thinking through:

The unit of value in advertising has shifted.
From impressions.
To attentive, interactive seconds inside an experience.

That’s not a semantic tweak. That’s a currency swap.

Impressions measure opportunity.
Attentive seconds measure use.

Snap didn’t bolt attention metrics onto a CPM business. It rebuilt the system so time, interaction, and participation are native to how inventory is created, priced, and optimized. Attention isn’t a report card at the end. It’s part of the transaction itself.

This is why Snap feels “different” in dashboards. It’s not misbehaving. It’s operating in a different economic unit than most planning models were designed to handle.

Feed logic assumes one thing above all else: visibility creates influence. If people see it, the work is mostly done.

Camera- and chat-native logic assumes something else entirely: participation creates influence. If people use it, play with it, send it, try it on, influence compounds quietly and off-screen.

That difference matters. A lot.

Feeds reward scrolling.
Cameras reward doing.
Chats reward proximity.

Those are not interchangeable behaviors, and pretending they are is how you end up comparing impressions that do fundamentally different kinds of work.

Snap monetizes proximity, not visibility. Which is exactly why it makes attribution systems uncomfortable.

Private sharing, one-to-one messaging, small group communication. These don’t show up neatly in last-click dashboards or platform-native reports. They surface later, sideways, often only in MMM, lift studies, or delayed sales curves.

Calling that “hard to measure” misses the indictment.

Dark social isn’t a channel problem. It’s a measurement failure mode.
Our systems were built to observe public, linear exposure. Snap was built for private, multi-touch persuasion.

If Snap looks weak in your dashboard, that usually says less about Snap and more about the architecture of the dashboard.

This is not about Snap being misunderstood.
It’s about planners, buyers, and CFOs mis-specifying what media is.

They’re still optimizing for visibility in a world where influence increasingly forms through participation. Still pricing impressions while attention has already become time-based. Still trusting systems that reward what’s easiest to justify, not what’s most effective.

Snap didn’t cause that mismatch.
It just makes it impossible to ignore.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.

The free version explains what’s broken.
ADOTAT+ explains why it stays broken.

You already saw the headline truth:
impressions were never the currency, time was.
But the paid layer shows what happens after you accept that.

In ADOTAT+ you see:

The uncomfortable part isn’t the math.
It’s the incentives.

ADOTAT+ is where the analysis stops being polite and starts touching capital allocation, career risk, and the reasons “safe” plans keep beating better ones.

If you want comfort, stay free.
If you want to understand why money moves the way it does even when the math says it shouldn’t, that’s behind the paywall.