Snapchat's photos might disappear seconds after its young users open them, but keeping the young social network afloat requires advertising that stick in their minds a little longer than that.
In turn, Snapchat's audience offers an alluring prospect to the advertising industry, which yearns for ways to tap into the overwhelmingly young user base that has flocked to the ephemeral image sharing app.
That's why the company's 25-year-old CEO and founder Evan Spiegel travelled to Cannes, France this week to pitch his burgeoning advertising business at the industry's biggest party of the year. Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles sat down with the Stanford dropout during Monday's keynote before a crowd full of ad execs to talk about Snapchat's new vertical video ads, the company's experimentation in the space and -- perhaps inevitably -- dick pics.
Cosmo editor Joanna Coles interviewing Evan Spiegel, opens by asking #Cannes Lions audience 'who's sent dick picks on Snapchat?'— Claire Atkinson (@claireatki) June 22, 2015
During the chat, Spiegel outlined some of the ways he wants Snapchat to flout the current vogue in social media and mobile advertising.
For one, he wants to put an end to the long-held notion that video is better viewed in landscape. Vertical videos can be just as effective, he says, without requiring users to tilt their phone -- it's just a matter of making creative use of the available space. Snapchat's users have been recording and viewing videos in portrait-mode in years, so the platform is well-positioned to pioneer the trend.
But the nature of Snapchat's quick-vanishing and semi-anonymous platform also means that the company can't dig up the kind of data on its users' interests and demographics that other social networks can.
That's okay though, Spiegel says, because he doesn't want to his company to be "creepy" anyway. The sentiment turns what some marketers see as a drawback in Snapchat's lack of targeting power into a stand against intrusive online marketing that makes people wary about privacy.
"We really care about not being creepy,” he said, according to Venture Beat. “That’s really important to us.”
Spiegel delved more into his vertical video ad plan in a video released in conjunction with his appearance. Sitting cross-legged in an armchair amidst an unusually drab office setting for a $16-billion tech company, the young founder refers to targeted ads as a thing of the past, casting Snapchat's flashy videos as the way into the future.
"In the early days of Internet advertising, marketers relied on things like targeting to differentiate ad products that weren't very engaging," Spiegel says in the video.
Spiegel also had a word of advice to the brands that clutter your Twitter timeline with overly friendly unsolicited overtures: take it easy.
"We think it's weird when brands try to act like your pal. I think there's some nuance -- I think it's very important to be friendly, but not a buddy," Spiegel said, per Business Insider.
Instead, brands should concentrate on building more context around their message, he says, pointing to an ad campaign Snapchat ran with P&G this last weekend that worked the company's brand into four videos of fathers playing with kids as an example of this strategy in action.
But for all Spiegel's high-minded talk, will Snapchat be able to deliver on his trend-bucking promises? The company's recent experimentation in different kinds of ad formats suggests it may be on track.
Re/Code reported last week that the company may pull in up to $400,000 per day for ads mixed into its Live Stories--the montages of user-submitted photos and videos that document high-profile events like Coachella or presidential campaign rallies.
Snapchat runs similar ads alongside its Discover platform, which it launched in partnership with media brands as a bid to make the app a destination for news and media content.
The company is also testing out ways of getting users to actively engage with brands. Last week, the company brought advertising to its geo-filters -- the location-specific themes that users can use to decorate photos in the vicinity of certain attractions -- with a McDonald's campaign that lets Snapchatters adorn their posts and messages with Big Macs, fries and golden arches.
But even these experiments are just the tip of the iceberg of what the company's ads operation is dreaming up, Spiegel said. The company only ends up rolling out "maybe 1%" of the products it develops, he says.
“We build stuff all the time that’s never released," Spiegel said. "It’s just terrible.”