When Grace Kao joined Snapchat to lead marketing, she was tasked with maintaining the brand’s “challenger spirit” while reassuring both its users and advertisers it is a place of “authenticity”.

But having joined the business in January as vice-president for consumer and business marketing, she was quickly promoted to chief marketing officer in April, a title that hadn’t existed at Snapchat for two years.

The business hasn’t had a CMO since Kenny Mitchell left in 2023, with the platform’s previous marketing lead, Colleen DeCourcy, holding the title of chief creative officer.

However, while Kao and DeCourcy may have different job titles, she feels this is just semantics.

“It’s always been the same mission,” Kao tells Marketing Week, stating that her and DeCourcy’s vision is aligned despite their titles differing.

To be able to differentiate and position Snapchat out there around what we stand for is one of my number one goals.

Grace Kao, Snapchat

That vision involves positioning Snapchat as a platform where all its audiences, whether that be users, creators or brand advertisers, can harness authenticity and creativity.

Before joining Snapchat earlier this year, Kao’s brand roles included time at Spotify, Instagram, Pandora and Yahoo. One thing that unites all these roles is the fact they “challenge the status quo”, Kao asserts, adding that she’s always loved working for disruptive brands.

“Once the challenger brand becomes not the challenger, you should still never lose that spirit, because I think most of creativity does come from that challenging spirit,” she says.

This is something that drives her forward at Snapchat, the belief that it offers something different from what is out there, that can positively impact consumers.

Asserting what Snapchat is

Last year, Snapchat launched a major brand campaign ‘Less Social Media, More Snapchat’, designed to differentiate itself from its competitive set. Speaking to Marketing Week at the time of launch, DeCourcy recognised the negative perceptions around social media in general and said Snapchat was well set up to be “the antidote” to that.

Kao describes last year’s campaign as an “important stake in the ground” for Snapchat but says now is the time to move that message on.

“This year is almost the phase two of that. We talked about what we weren’t, but now we’re going to talk about what we are,” she says.

Since joining Snapchat at the beginning of this year, she has spent a lot of time thinking about what the brand stands for. An area of key differentiation for Snapchat is the snap itself, she notes, and the fact the platform opens onto the snap camera, rather than a newsfeed.

‘We’re not social media’: Snapchat seeks to distinguish itself from category

“Unlike other apps, where perhaps when you open up, it’s about scrolling; we’re the only app [that] actually opens up to a camera,” she says.

When it launched over a decade ago, Snapchat was seen as being highly unusual in the social media space for this very reason. It is now looking to emphasise those roots and dial up the snap itself and “what it stands for”, says Kao.

The new campaign is entitled, ‘Say It in a Snap’, and it is designed to emphasise the platform as the place to capture raw and fleeting moments.

“It is the belief that connecting with people should be fast and easy,” notes Kao.

Social media in general is often seen as something that causes young people in particular to cut themselves off from “the real world”, but Snapchat is designed so that everything is grounded in connections with family and friends, she says.

Taking on leadership of the brand, this campaign plays into a broader overall priority for Kao in her first year.

“To be able to differentiate and position Snapchat out there around what we stand for is one of my number one goals,” she asserts.

Driving user ‘happiness’

Typically, executives at social media or technology platforms may look to monthly average users or advertising revenue as the foremost indicators of success. However, for Kao, driving user “happiness” is a key metric of success for her.

She again maintains that Snapchat’s point of difference from much of its competitive set is “connection” and “a place that people can authentically express themselves”. This, she says, means that users of Snapchat are more happy versus those on other social media platforms.

“So to me, a metric of success on the highest level is just happy users,” she says.

While happy users might sound a fluffier metric than time spent on the platform by users, or money spent by advertisers, she notes that it is deeply connected to more commercial objectives.

When I open up Snapchat and I see the amazing things that our community are creating, as a marketer, I’m like, our stuff has to be as good as what people are actually creating on platform.

Grace Kao, Snapchat

Happy users are more likely to want to spend time on the platform, use it more frequently and recommend it to others. They’re also more likely to have a mindset to engage with brand content on the platform.

“With happy users it quite honestly then means happy advertisers,” Kao notes.

Indeed, the brand commissioned research, working with IPG Mediahub and Amplified Intelligence, finding that happiness drove stronger results for advertisers on Snapchat versus on other platforms, with the business posing the hypothesis that users are more likely to be predisposed to receive advertisers positively on the platform.

‘Shared language of creativity’

As CMO, Kao’s role covers marketing the brand both to its users and its advertiser partners.

Kao says her approach to representing Snapchat as a brand to advertisers versus users doesn’t massively differ, with all groups wanting “different experiences to connect, whether with that’s with your family, friends or the audiences that you want to reach”.

Snapchat’s differentiation versus other platforms represents an opportunity for advertisers “looking to do something different”, she says. In particular, it offers an opportunity to brands to be able to have “more intimate relationships and more long-standing relationships”.

As well as priding itself on the happiness of users, Snapchat also sees itself as a home for creativity and authentic expression. Kao says that the platform sees “wonderful” examples of creativity from creators and its ‘Snap Stars’ as well as ordinary users.

Marketers are the architects of creativity, not bystanders

The level of creativity on the platform sets the bar high for Snap’s marketing team, she notes.

“When I open up Snapchat and I see the amazing things that our community is creating, as a marketer, I’m like, our stuff has to be as good as what people are actually creating on platform,” she says. “I think it’s actually a wonderful challenge and a wonderful bar to uphold for us as the marketing team.”

The same standard goes for the brand’s advertising partners that work on the platform. They need to tailor their work for Snapchat specifically to engage users.

“What I always say is that you almost have to show up like a Snapchatter, because the community is so creative,” Kao says. “So how do you have that shared language of creativity and not just be an interruption, but actually have a chat and have a dialogue?”

There are plenty of tools on the Snapchat platform for advertisers to be able to harness that creativity, she says, whether that be through maps, where the platform gives partners the chance to use a promoted places tool, or through a more traditional video format.

This is another key goal of Kao’s, emphasising to both users and advertisers the range of features that Snapchat contains, all in the one app. The term “super app” is thrown about a lot, meaning apps that offer lots of different functionalities all on the one platform.

“Snap is one of the first super apps,” Kao says. “We obviously have chat, we have maps, we have video, and we open up to the camera. So a lot of our journey is to drive understanding that Snapchat is all of these things.”