Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…In a way that Instagram and WhatsApp really aren’t. Yeah, so let’s play that out. So now we’re into what would happened otherwise. If the acquisition had gone through, this is pre-revenue for Snapchat, does Facebook kind of have their way with it and start gathering more information about the Snapchat user, or even better yet, they’d probably find a way to just tie those together on the phone where they say, “Oh, this person’s logged into his Facebook here,” they ask you to log in with Facebook once in the Snapchat app so they can tie it together, much like with Instagram then an advertiser can target you in multiple ways and can say “I’m going to use the same ad dashboard, I get the same targeting capabilities and I’m going to target this Snapchat user as if they were any other Facebook user, but I want to reach them when they’re having this aha moment instead of when they’re in the Facebook app reading about X, Y, Z. ” I think that’s absolutely what would have happened because they would have used that common ad platform and continue to leverage it and make it even easier for advertisers to advertise on multiple mediums. And that is very different than the ad strategy that Snapchat is doing now. Yeah. This is what makes this… well, listeners are the judge of whether this is interesting or not. But to me, what makes this so interesting is like since the spurned acquisition offer, Snapchat has really totally gone off and become the anti-Facebook. And that goes not just through the product and the consumer-facing aspects of it but through the whole advertising platform as well. I mean, Evan talks about and promises that they will never do creepy targeting. That Snapchat is a brand advertising platform and they will not track users, they will not collect data. Privacy is core to what Snapchat is. And that’s just anathema to the Facebook and in a lot of ways the Google way of doing advertising.…

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