Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel recently unveiled what Snapchat ads are going to look like, and it’s pretty old fashioned.
In what was probably the weirdest combination of three people on a stage, Spiegel was interviewed alongside former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg by Yahoo’s Katie Couric at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit.
When asked about his plans for monetization of the app, Spiegel said Snapchat will soon include ads that will show up in the middle of Snapchat Stories, although he didn’t give a timeline of when that would happen. Spiegel then said the ads will be pretty old-fashioned in the sense that they won’t be targeted to users based on their data.
The Wall Street Journal had more details on Spiegel’s vision for the ads:
The messages will appear within the Snapchat Stories feature, in between the photos and videos shared by users, and will not be targeted to individual users based on their tastes, he said.
“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 a world where social media’s biggest selling point is its access to tons of data on its users, this doesn’t seem like an ad product most marketers would get too excited about.
