Snapchat founder and Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel has outlined the platform’s strategic priorities, including the next stage for Snap ads, in a letter to staff marking the company’s 15th anniversary.
Spiegel also pointed his finger at “ruthless competitors who have ripped us off,” while he also sought to separate Snapchat from the broader categorization of social media apps, and the harms that they cause.
Spiegel’s letter is essentially a call to action to his employees, highlighting the platform’s constant innovation as a key strength that will keep it ahead of the pack.
Spiegel also talked about the connective benefits of Snapchat and cited recent studies that highlighted positive associations between Snapchat use and “friendship closeness, friend support, and wellbeing.”
“These studies do not prove causation, but you can be proud that unlike social media, the service we’ve built is associated with a measurably positive impact on the world,” Spiegel said.
In terms of future opportunities, Spiegel said Snapchat’s strength is in facilitating friend connections, which hasn’t always been easy to monetize. But multimodal models, powered by artificial intelligence, are providing new ways to sequence user actions in order to generate recommendations for what a person might want to do or buy next, which could open up new potential for the business.
“This has profound implications for the future of advertising and for our service,” Spiegel said. “Today, digital advertising relies heavily on explicit intent signals, like searching for a product or visiting a website and adding something to your cart. It is difficult for advertisers to generate incremental demand instead of competing to convert intent that already exists. I believe Snapchat can change that with generative advertising by starting with our community, understanding what matters to them, generating recommendations for what they might want next, and then finding the businesses that are the best match.”
Essentially, Spiegel is hoping that AI models will be able to glean signals from user interactions that will align with relevant products. Snapchat can then display these to users based on inherent interest, as opposed to explicit signals.
Spiegel also discussed the rise in creator partnerships, which can facilitate more brand opportunities. He said that creator ads were played 25% longer and drove 16% more active attention than standard branding ads. Spiegel added that Snapchat has more than 300,000 creators eligible to work with brands.
Finally, Spiegel said that he intends to make it easier than ever to find and share products on Snapchat, while also organically boosting content about products in order to drive shopping behavior in the app.
These are some interesting notes, which don’t have definitive product clarity as yet, but do provide some insight into Snapchat’s ad focus moving forward.
