Marketers looking for news on Snapchat’s advertising tools will have to wait a little bit longer.
At the the Mobile Marketing Association’s SM2 Innovation Summit in New York this week, Snapchat COO Emily White said it was still “early days” for Snapchat’s marketing platform ambitions, and for now it was focused on its product.
Although she acknowledged that brands such as Taco Bell and McDonald’s had come up with some innovative ways to market their brand on the platform, she had little more to offer advertisers.
Jessi Hempel reports in Wired:
What could that mean for advertisers? White didn’t offer much. She didn’t address last month’s speculation the company was feeling out plans for an advertising tool called Snapchat discovery, saying the company was currently focusing on its product. (Snapchat has launched several new features in the past year, including Snapchat Stories, which lets users string together photos that will last for 24 hours, and geofilters, which let users add location-based filters to their photos). She also didn’t address some advertisers’ concerns that the ephemeral nature of the messages means people can spread nasty gossip, sext, or otherwise act inappropriately.
You would think Snapchat would make a bigger pitch to advertisers at Ad Week, especially since the company was reported to be actively courting them for a new feature called Snapchat Discovery. But it’s possible the company figured it had a lot more work to do in terms of developing its platform, its audience and the problem of its massive data usage among cell phones before pitching itself to brands.
Still, it’s safe to assume monetization is a priority for Snapchat. It’s one of the biggest reasons the company poached White from her previous position at Instagram, where she was responsible for making the platform a viable generator of ad revenues.
