The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2018
Snapchat ran an ad asking users to 'slap Rihanna' — and lost $800M in a day
A 'Would You Rather' game ad referenced Rihanna's 2009 assault. She called it out on Instagram; Snap's stock dropped 4.3 per cent the next day.
Snap Inc. · 2018-03-12
What happened
In March 2018, Snapchat users in the United States saw a mobile-game ad inside the app's 'Would You Rather' format. The prompt asked whether they would rather 'slap Rihanna' or 'punch Chris Brown,' referencing the 2009 felony assault in which Brown pleaded guilty to hitting Rihanna. The ad ran for several days before Snapchat removed it on March 12, calling it 'disgusting' and saying it had been published 'in error' and violated the platform's guidelines.
On March 15, Rihanna responded on Instagram Stories, accusing Snapchat of making a 'joke' of domestic violence and asking: 'Was this intentionally put together to make me look bad?' Snap's stock fell roughly 4.3 per cent the following day, wiping out nearly $800 million in market value. The Guardian reported the drop as nearly $1 billion by some measures.
The ad was not Snapchat's own creative — it was a third-party game ad that passed through the platform's review process. But the failure was Snapchat's: its ad-review system approved a prompt that trivialised a documented assault, and the company's first public statement blamed an error rather than acknowledging a review failure.
Why it happened
- The ad-review system approved a prompt referencing a real, named domestic-violence case without flagging it
- Snapchat's first statement called the ad 'disgusting' but framed it as a publishing error, not a process failure
- Rihanna's response turned a contained moderation miss into a global story about the platform's values
- The market punished the stock because the incident raised questions about Snapchat's judgement at a time when it was already losing users to Instagram
The lesson
An ad-review system that can approve a named assault as entertainment has no content policy — it has a checkbox. The review is the product.
Aftermath
Snapchat apologised and said it had fixed the review process. The incident came during a difficult period for Snap, which was already facing user backlash over a redesign earlier that year. Rihanna's criticism drew attention to how platforms handle sensitive content in advertising.
Sources
- NPR: Snapchat's Stock Sinks After Rihanna Denounces Domestic Violence Ad
- The Guardian: Rihanna accuses Snapchat of making 'joke' of domestic violence
- BBC Newsbeat: Snapchat apologises for Rihanna domestic violence ad
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