Cannes is certainly a time to hear from some top executives who are otherwise hard to pin down—case in point: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. The executive made an appearance during a talk at Cannes today and covered several topics that brands and agencies are watching, including the Elon Musk/Twitter situation, the future of augmented reality, and the role social media platforms play beyond their bottom line. Here are some takeaways from the panel.
Broadening the lens
During Snap’s last Partner Summit, it touted that the app has amassed over 600 million monthly users and over 330 million daily users. But newer users often associate Snapchat with augmented reality more so than its social media capabilities, according to Spiegel. “At the core, Snapchat is really about communicating with your friends and family and that's what drives the frequency of use, so what we find is that when people first start using our product, oftentimes maybe in a new country or where Snapchat hasn't grown as much, they start using it for our augmented reality lenses to express themselves, or they use it to watch new content," Spiegel said. “And then over time they add friends and start talking to their friends more often and start coming into the app with much higher frequency. So our growth strategy has always been to bring people into this service through all of these different products that we offer. And then of course grow their frequency of use over time by helping them connect with their friends and build their relationships with their friends through Snapchat and through visual communication.”