Specialist
Former Senior Director at Snap Inc
Agenda
- Social media overview, examining users, engagement and advertising spending
- Snap Inc's (NYSE: SNAP) positioning and the importance of partnerships
- Competitive landscape for Snap Inc, highlighting Instagram (NASDAQ: FB), TikTok and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR)
- H2 2020-21 outlook for social media category and Snap Inc in particular amid the novel coronavirus pandemic
Questions
1.
How would you describe Snap and what the company does? The company has called itself a camera company which perhaps doesn’t align with external perceptions.
2.
Which key trends do you think are impacting Snap aside from the coronavirus? What influences Snap’s positioning and investments, or which trends does it try to benefit from?
3.
Could you elaborate on the privacy element and if it is an important tenet that the company holds? Do you think it ultimately impacts everything, from product and feature design and roll-out to working with users, advertisers and partners? To what extent are people making choices based on Snap being a privacy- prioritising platform, if you will, especially given Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data breach and Europe’s GDPR implementation?
4.
Do you think Snap could benefit if governments and global regulatory authorities potentially investigate and take actions against some of Snap’s competitors that fall into the big tech category? How might that impact Snap? Would advertisers want to align more with a company such as Snap because it clearly values privacy?
5.
What do you think are currently Snap’s key offerings and why? There are several products such as Camera, Chat, Discover, Snap Map, Memories and Spectacles, and there is often a lot of attention when a new version is released, but I get the impression it’s more about PR.
6.
Following Snap’s partner summit on 11 June 2020, there is some talk about Snap becoming more of a super app, something along the lines of WeChat in China. What are your general thoughts here? Would Snap eventually make different apps or versions so they are easier for people to have and access?
7.
Would it be fair to say that aside from performance, a big part of the Android rewrite was to account for emerging markets where people use Android smartphones, and enabling all the features and functionality that people would want? Do you think Snap is still seeking to innovate and add features and functionality to Snapchat for emerging markets? Alternatively, would it take the bones of the existing app and explore uptake in other ways?
8.
It would appear that Snap’s innovations such as the camera, stories and Bitmoji have been adopted by many other companies. That said, the more recent emphasis on lenses for AR and Discover – professionally produced content – seem to be harder to replicate because there’s more involved, whether very large and integrated partnerships or significant R&D around the lens product. Do you think these are lessons learned by Snap? What are your thoughts on how the product or business has evolved?
9.
How important or big can Discover and Snap Originals be? Could you also elaborate on the international implications? At the Partner Summit, Snap announced expanded, multi-year content partnerships with Disney, ESPN and NBC, Viacom, CBS, the NBA [National Basketball Association] and the NFL [National Football League], and indicated that Snap Originals has been watched by over 50% of the US generation Z population.
10.
Snap and other purveyors of digital and social media have indicated more users and increased usage following coronavirus-induced closures. How do you think Snap is positioned in this context, especially given what you said about Snap being the fastest way to communicate with friends, and its strong orientation to generation Z or the 13-34 age range?
11.
Advertisers seemingly have been going back to basics since mid-March amid the reality of the coronavirus and lockdowns, and focusing on the largest platforms such as Google and Facebook while pausing experimentation on other platforms such as Snapchat, presumably. What are your thoughts here and do you think Snap is open to some risks given the pandemic environment?
12.
Aside from Lenses and Discover, what else would you say differentiates Snap as a company or Snapchat as a property? For example, it is heavily investing in R&D in advertising technology and self-service offerings.
13.
Snap had a tough couple of years in 2018 and ’19 which involved some restructuring efforts, and it would appear to be more thoughtful about spending now. What is your assessment of Snap’s orientation to spending and how does that connect more broadly with company culture and the management team?
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