Ad Exec: 'I Struggle To Think Of Any Of Our Clients Who Would Be Willing To Even Pilot Advertising On Snapchat'

The disappearing-message mobile app Snapchat has become a divisive company within the tech community, splitting industry analysts between those who think the service's 26 million users and unique function are evidence it's worth every penny of the $3 billion Facebook offered to acquire it, and those who feel Snapchat is vastly overpriced for a company with no revenues and no clear path to earning them.

Last week, we wrote about how bringing advertising to Snapchat would scare off its users, but it now appears that Snapchat's users might just be the ones who scare off prospective advertisers.

In an interview with Ad Age, the president of global advertising network Tribal Worldwide's U.S. operations said that the rumors of rampant cyber-bullying and sexting on Snapchat platform could dissuade brands from wanting to put their messages beside such unseemly content.

"I struggle to think of any of our clients who would be willing to even pilot advertising on Snapchat," Tribal U.S. president of U.S. operations Rich Guest said. Tribal is a huge agency that handles McDonald's, Volkswagen and Reebok, among many others.

You might remember Tumblr had a similar issue with pornographic content before it was sold to Yahoo for more than $1 billion in May. As it stands, porn is still readily available on Tumblr, although the blogging service did manage to institute a reform that prevents users from searching for blogs using hashtags like #Gay, #Porn, and #NSFW. Tumblr made moderate progress by rolling out a new form of dashboard ads, but it isn't expected to really contribute to Yahoo's revenues until next year.

While Tumblr will ultimately get a boost from being able to leverage user data about followers and reblogs to target advertisements, Snapchat's entire product is centered on the fact that it deletes that data shortly after its messages are received.