'We celebrate the fact that we are different from other platforms'

Snap Inc. had not had a chief marketing officer since 2023 until Grace Kao was promoted to the role earlier this year.

- Soumya Gupta [e-mail]

She has a difficult balancing act to pull off: to keep the flagship app Snapchat as true to its wild messaging roots as possible, but without losing grip on advertisers hungry to remain relevant to the elusive Gen Z and increasingly even younger generations of users. In an interview, Kao tells Mint how the California-headquartered firm is taking this forward, as it launches Snapchat's first-ever brand marketing campaign. Edited excerpts:

Snap now has a CMO after a couple of years. How has it been in these first few months?

I've been attending a new employee orientation even though it’s been 9-10 months for me in the organization [laughs]. In terms of campaigns, last year was less about social media, more about Snapchat. We're now clearly wanting to establish that we're different. Last year, we'd said what we aren't. Now we've to say what we are. I wanted [Snap] to have a new value proposition and brand positioning.