In his first wide-ranging interview since joining Snap at the start of 2023, Ajit Mohan sits down with Campaign to discuss how the platform focuses its efforts on the bottom-funnel approach and where it wants to play in the generative AI space.

Ajit Mohan, the president of Asia Pacific for Snap, the maker of Snapchat, is a man on a mission.   The former vice president and managing director of Meta in India joined the platform at the start of 2023 when Snap saw a quarterly sales decline amid digital ad market disruptions. The company reported a 7% drop in Q1 revenue to $988.6 million compared to the previous year. Mohan, a former management consultant, has spent the last half of the year trying to convince advertisers in Japan, China, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia to spend their money on Snap rather than on TikTok, Meta and Google. 

However, Mohan has a mammoth task, given that Snap has faced significant challenges due to rapid changes in the digital advertising sector, influenced by unfavourable macroeconomic conditions and the impact of Apple’s privacy policy alterations.  

These changes have resulted in increased difficulty in tracking the effectiveness of specific ad campaigns.  “The changes in the ecosystem impacted everyone, leading to the need for new forms of accountability and delivering results for partners. This was a common challenge for all,” Mohan tells Campaign.  “We have focused on building the lower funnel, the direct response (DR) funnel.

In the early years of monetisation on Snapchat, we heavily relied on brand ads. However, over the past 12 months, we have made deliberate shifts and investments to strengthen our DR capabilities. We are now developing a new area of expertise that adds value to our partners and drives revenue for our platform.”  In addition, the mass layoffs hitting the tech sector have also not shielded Snap. Most of the senior hires in APAC, announced a year ago by Snap, are no longer in their roles.   For example, Amanda Ang, the former head of public policy for East Asia at Snap, joined Circles.Life after just four months. Ang said she was impacted by the “tech winter of 2022” on her LinkedIn page. 

Other departures include Saurabh Dangwal, the former head of global brands for APAC, who moved on to Spotify after just eight months in his role. Dan Heffernan, the former director of a global agency in APAC, has joined TikTok and Igor Lima, the former head of global brands and tech for Snap in APAC, vacated his role after just five months.  Improving its advertising offerings To address Snap’s current challenges in the digital ad market, Snap is focusing on its augmented reality offerings and building a performance business, incorporating lower funnel capabilities, measurement, attribution, and conversion optimisation.  Snap has also tapped into the generative AI trend with the launch of My AI and a subscription offering called Snapchat+. 

(Source: Campaign Asia)