This week, however, Mr. Norman said, “A note came to us
and said, now we have a situation where one of our lenses we paid for on Snapchat has been appropriated by a porn star, and the porn star has used our lens.”
The lens was not used in an explicit manner, but the brand was concerned that it could be, according to Mr. Norman.
W.” meaning “not safe for work.”)
“We now live in an age, having lived through generations of highly curated media like
and ABC and NBC, to a world of less curated media or not curated media, and advertisers need to learn what their tolerance for risk is,” Mr. Norman said.
While the ads do not appear on the same screen as the explicit images, Mr. Norman said
that GroupM has been advising clients concerned about the issue to stick to Snapchat’s curated news service, Discover, or its filters and selfie lenses.
GroupM, which oversees billions of digital-advertising dollars as the media investing arm of the ad giant WPP, recently sent clients a memo about their
ads possibly running before or after “explicit adult content” on Snapchat’s Stories feature, if a user chooses to follow such accounts on the app.
“If it’s zero, it leads you down a certain path, and if it’s not there, it leads you down a different path.”
He added, “There’s an expectation from advertisers and regulators and consumers
that these companies, which are fairly rich in revenue and certainly rich in profile and total number of users, should make it an extremely high investment priority to keep their platforms safe.”
A version of this article appears in print on March 11, 2017, on Page B2 of the New York
edition with the headline: Advertisers Fret Over Proximity to Lewd Snapchat Stories.