Why Snap’s creative chief is doubling down on ephemeral content

With sweeping changes in content policies at major social media platforms, the day shall arrive where social platforms become unregulated, free-for-all dissemination platforms. With this, it’s only natural that misinformation, harmful content, and greater polarisation of opinion take over our digital spaces.

One platform that has been sitting on the sidelines watching this all unfold is Snapchat, the instant messaging app founded 13 years ago by Snap Inc. One of the main features of the app is ephemeral content—namely Snaps and Chats—that disappears 24 hours after it’s posted; the content is also deleted from the Snap servers. This ephemeral nature proves to be a boon to the platform amid heated moral debate around content moderation. Plus, the app opens to a camera instead of a timeline the way Instagram or TikTok does.

The ephemeral nature of its content has been the subject of Snap’s recently launched positioning titled ‘Less Social Media, More Snapchat’. The idea of the campaign is that one should focus less on likes and validation around permanent, sometimes-contrived content, and rather, to post more freely and feel a ‘genuine connection’. The company is doubling down on the notion that it’s built as a type of antidote to social media in the first place because of its format.

Colleen DeCourcy, the tour-de-force creative who now leads global creative and marketing endeavours at Snap, tells Campaign Asia-Pacific that the fact that messages on Snapchat are deleted by default is meant to mimic real-life conversations.

“When you talk to your friends in real life, there are no likes or counts. Snap doesn’t open to an endless feed. We don’t have live streaming,” says DeCourcy. “Snapchatters prefer to keep it real, keep it close, keep it intimate. This means that over 90% of people who use the platform say they feel comfortable, happy, connected.”

Based on research from Australia’s Black Dog Institute on the mental-health impact of social media on Australians, Snapchat was found to be the least disruptive for respondents. The study said that higher daily hours on Snapchat were not significantly associated with mental health effects, while higher daily hours on Instagram were associated with greater depression and anxiety. High daily use of TikTok also resulted in poor mental health, including insomnia and disordered eating due to issues such as upward social comparisons and distressing content.

One of the reasons Snap is so steadfast about its format is the lack of ‘curation’ required to be ‘authentic’ on its platform, which DeCourcy implies naturally lends to organic content. One of the ways the platform does that—at least from an engineering standpoint—is the speed with which the camera opens up when the app is launched. This speed, according to DeCourcy, emphasises the immediacy of the platform, which is reflective of real-life interactions.

“A lot of what we see on social media is the need to present as a version of yourself. That is the antithesis of what we want it to be,” says DeCourcy.

However, on the undeniable toxicity of online content in general, DeCourcy argues that Snapchat's lack of permanence means that information such as fact or news-based information doesn't have to be moderated the same way it does through largely human-led efforts at other social media platforms. She stresses that safety is consciously built into the app as it aspires to be a 'safer, healthy' alternative. 

“We are not a traditional social-media platform but we are primarily a messaging service. Messages that delete my default because they mimic real-life conversations and we don’t have public like counts. We don’t open to an endless feed. We don’t have live-streaming. So it may look like apples to apples when you’re looking at the impact of social media on culture, but Snapchatters know that’s now how they use us,” she says.

On whether Snapchat considers messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Line competitors, DeCourcy says they’re different platforms and asserts that Snapchat’s audience is “largely unreplicated.”

The birth of ‘Less Social Media’

DeCourcy is a veteran creative behind some of the most memorable ads of the decade, including Nike’s infamous Colin Kaepernick campaign about taking a stand against racial inequity. She spearheaded this campaign and many more as Wieden+Kennedy’s global creative chief for nine years from 2013. In late 2021, DeCourcy announced her retirement from the industry but swiftly journeyed back to it six months later as Snap’s creative chief.

On Snap’s ‘Less Social Media, More Snapchat’ positioning, she says that the idea was buried inside the ethos of the platform all along.

“This wasn’t something that we created and laid on top of the company. One of the great joys of coming into this organisation and doing this job internally is being able to [immerse] in the culture, resources, and history more deeply,” she says. “All I was doing was picking up a thread that [co-founders] Evan [Spiegel] and Bobby [Murphy] laid down 13 years ago.”

DeCourcy’s entirely in-house creative team began to pick apart Snapchat’s ephemeral nature and what it considers its selling point.

“We were wondering whether to lean into a big political moment or choose to talk about who we were and why we come into work everyday. Honestly, we decided on the latter,” she says.

DeCourcy is aware that nuance and social media are not two things that go hand-in-hand so her team started looking at broader, more philosophical questions about Snapchat such as ‘What aren’t we?’ and ‘What have we never been?’ and ‘What does all the research into our community tell us?’ and ‘What do we know about our origin story?’

“The team throws work on the wall, and we keep circling until something resonates. We kept going round and round, and Evan [Spiegel] eventually said, ‘What do you wanna say?’ I told him that I just want people to do less of the other things and connect more with people. Less social media, and more this,” she says. “So we kicked it off as a way for people to say, ‘Wait a minute, are you really saying you’re not social media?’ And that paved the way to a real conversation.”

Given the entirely in-house creative process of Snap’s creative output, DeCourcy says she sees both the benefits and negatives in working with agencies vs in-housing—particularly being a former agency leader herself.

“I’m still a very big believer in the idea that a bit of distance or freedom of opinion is so incredibly healthy,” she says about the importance of agencies. “I would argue that [distance] is fundamentally crucial to [create] breakthrough work for a brand because you can’t just be talking about what you believe all the time. You need the push and pull.”

Nevertheless, she believes that the same “push-and-pull” dynamic can exist internally within a brand, even if it’s admittedly harder.

“I haven’t figured it out 100%, but our internal creative and design team is phenomenally talented, and they know the brand inside out and backwards. They get ahead of problems. They’re getting closer to the product every day. I look at what they can do, and I think to myself, ‘I never could have done that from the outside’,” she says.

Snap’s creative is also augmented by freelancers, typically agency talent, some of whom DeCourcy used to work with at W+K.

When it comes to AI, DeCourcy doesn’t shy from singing its praises but shares a similar sentiment with most other industry leaders.

“What I love AI for is for kickstarting processes, not making the work or replacing the writer. It’s about replacing the hours and hours of swinging the cat around trying to figure out how big a room is,” she says. “And then there’s Gen AI. Any creative who doesn’t think that the addition of [Gen AI] to the toolbox is mind-blowing, I question what they’re protecting.”

When it comes to revenue and brand involvement, Snapchat’s unique demographic ensures that it remains strong, especially given the uncertainty around TikTok’s future in the US.

"Overall environment of uncertainty (around TikTok) is benefiting our business. Advertisers are very focused on contingency planning and diversifying their spend," CEO Evan Spiegel said during a post-earnings call in February.

For context, Snapchat reaches 90% of the 13- to 24-year-old population and 75% of the 13- to 34-year-old population in over 25 countries including APAC, representing over 50% of global adspend.

“We have such deep loyalty with a very important and largely hard-to-reach demographic that people might also go to TikTok seeking,” says DeCourcy. “In no way are we basing our business to rely on someone else’s [circumstance], but of course, I think people should be always spending more with us.”