Snap’s Asia-Pacific president, Ajit Mohan, has told B&T the photo-sharing platform has a greater “resonance” with the creative industries and community than its rival platforms, giving it a distinct advantage for marketers in the process.
“Our company values are ‘Smart, Kind and Creative’ because the founders being out of LA, a lot of the original partnerships that we’ve built with publishers, media and news companies around the world, there has been more resonance between Snap and the creative world than probably with the other tech platforms,” Mohan said.
B&T is talking to Mohan at the JW Marriott hotel on Cannes’ Boulevard de la Croisette after a roundtable with him and three other Snap execs.
Conversations at Cannes were dominated by two things: AI and an overwhelming sense of tension between the creative industries that dominated the Palais theatre complex and the (relatively) newly minted tech platforms that had erected beach clubs and threw lavish parties.
“We see [creatives] as important, valued partners,” continued Mohan.
“I think it shows in the quality of relationships we have. If you ask agencies around the world, the consistent feedback we hear from both media and creative agencies is that our posture is one of collaboration. It’s not confrontation. We see them as a valuable part of the ecosystem. It’s a win-win opportunity. That’s not always been the case with every tech platform.”
And Mohan would know. Prior to joining Snap in January last year, he spent nearly four years working at Meta as its Indian vice president and managing director.
Both companies were present at Cannes. Snap held a remarkable party on Monday night with Honey Dijon DJing and a performance from Kelis. Meta, meanwhile, had a slightly more corporate seeming presence. Its beach space shut at 5pm every day, for example.
Regardless of the festivities on offer, two things were top of mind for Mohan during Cannes: Ensuring that marketers know that Snap gives them access to hard-to-reach demographics — 75 per cent of 13-34-year-olds use the platform — with increasing economic importance; and that its suite of tools, including its AR set of features, provide a canvas, rather than a constraint to creativity.
“One of the shifts that we have done well in the last 18 months is for marketers to think of us as a consequential, full-funnel platform rather than as a space only for AR innovation. The companies that know how to leverage us best are using us because we have a community that is not elsewhere, they are using in terms of leveraging AR, but they are also using us to drive bottom-funnel results and holding us accountable on whether we are delivering the metrics at par or better than your peer platforms. When they do all of that, it comes alive,” said Mohan.
“Obviously, they may have to create lenses that are specific to us or at least originate with us but we’re working to make it easy for marketers to leverage their existing creative to make lenses from them. We’re working in partnership with creative agencies to make sure the capability is being built out in the industry because marketers like scale, they love innovation and folks who lean in but they also like it when assets or creative can be utilised across platforms and we want to make that easier for them and make sure we’re playing a full-funnel role.”
Currently, there are eight million Snapchatters in Australia, or around 40 per cent of the population, explained Mohan. However, he believes that there is a “substantial” opportunity for the business in the ANZ market, especially so given that Snap has engineering, operations and enforcement teams in Australia rather than just a sales team and that 60 per cent of its eight million users interact with AR in some fashion “frequently.”
While the other tech platforms at Cannes were shouting from the rooftops about their AI-personalised creative at scale, Mohan explained that Snap sees “more power in being able to offer something that others don’t have.”
“The fact that we have a younger community, but that is also a community that has traditionally been harder to reach and engage with means that there is power in the cohort that we have,” he said.
“One of the things that I’m discovering and has been a big shift in the last 24 months is that more and more of the larger companies in the world and the biggest marketers are starting to think that they have to start speaking to the younger communities. Gen Z is a fairly wide band. Someone who’s 34 has purchasing power, a 13 or 18-year-old has a lot less and about 90 per cent of our platform is over 18 years old.
“But marketers want to start talking to them because they recognise that for the brands that they are building for the long term, they need to catch them young. Even for the very youngest members of the band, they may not have purchasing power today but it’s still of value especially because Gen Z is showing up in a world that looks quite different to the boomers and the generation behind. Therefore, having a platform that knows how to engage that community is powerful.”
