At Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Snapchat’s 24-year-old CEO, Evan Spiegel, unveiled his plan to bring advertising to the platform.
“We’re cutting through a lot of the new technology stuff around ads to sort of the core of it, which I think has always been telling a story that leaves people with a new feeling,” Spiegel said. “They’re not fancy. You just look at it if you want to look at it, and you don’t if you don’t.”
In other words, these ads won’t be targeted.
Currently the platform is receiving due attention from notable brands like Taco Bell, Karmaloop and others who have gained a sizeable following by creating content that is made specifically for Snapchat and worth the view. As Snapchat doesn’t have a discovery feature still like Instagram, the only way to reach an audience is by pushing out a brand’s Snapchat info on other social channels like say, Twitter.
Reportedly, Snapchat has been in talks with marketers and multiple media companies to roll out Snapchat Discovery at some point this year, which will curate news, ads and other content for the platform.
Some are calling this new ad business plan outright spam, while others are just happy that Snapchat is giving the mobile platform ad units to begin with. The reason for this could possibly be due to how little Snapchat asks of their users when signing up for an account and also the nature of the content on Snapchat itself, as everything created is also destroyed.
Still, it is a wonder why Snapchat isn’t using location-based targeting for this new ad unit.
Now to wait with bated breath to see how users react to this untargeted advertising and stick around for more. In spite of this, Spiegel’s attention to keeping Snapchat’s cool factor alive and well is not an after-thought:
“One of my pet peeves over time has been the technology industry has tried to sell counterculture, sell the revolution, and we have been really resistant to doing that.”
