Yesterday, Brad Stone and Sarah Frier published a feature in Bloomberg Business based on an exclusive interview with Evan Spiegel, SnapChat’s co-founder and CEO, who notoriously shies away from press interviews. Kudos to them for great reporting, and for finding a way to broadly give us Spiegel’s perspectives, even on those topics he claimed were “off the f***ing record.”
The piece, Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat Into a Real Business, tells the story of SnapChat’s growth and how Spiegel is a fiery young CEO with bright hopes for his startup’s future. But I’m left with a lot of questions throughout, as Spiegel claims to know what millennials want, even without studying data and trends that so many other publishers rely on in their attempts to give consumers the experience they supposedly want.
Image by Adam Przezdziek used under CC license https://www.flickr.com/photos/67683836@N02/
A lot of Spiegel’s plans for the future seem to rely on editorial content. SnapChat’s first attempt at this was Discover, where publishers such as CNN, People and National Geographic have signed on to share video editorial content. If I brought this up in my circle of millennial friends – who Spiegel is claiming to target – most of them wouldn’t even know what the Discover feature of SnapChat is. That doesn’t mean there isn’t potential, but nothing about Spiegel’s plans left me believing that SnapChat would make it into my morning news routine. Let those that are nailing the content game do that right now – like the Skimm, which has quickly made itself a part of many millennial morning routines with its quick and witty news bites from what’s happening around the world.
