Jeremi Gorman
Analyst · LightShed Partners. Please go ahead
Thank you, Evan. We’re pleased with our results for this quarter amidst a challenging and evolving global environment and we continue to see significant upside and opportunity for our business as we support our community and advertising partners. In Q2, we generated total revenue of $454 million, an increase of 17% year-over-year. We are confident that our business is well-positioned for the long-term, evidenced by the resilience we are seeing with direct response advertisers, as well as our continued success helping brands craft valuable messages and effectively reach our community. We’ve had a lot of conversations within Snap about how our team, our products, and our business can be forces for positive change in the world. In the U.S., our platform reaches 90% of 13 to 24 year olds and 75% of 13 to 34 year olds. This audience is critical for advertisers as the Snapchat Generation develops lifelong habits, but also because young people are focused on driving change in the world and building a better future. We take our responsibility to educate, inform, and support this incredible generation very seriously and we’ve committed to using our business as a force for good. Given the relationship we have built with the Snapchat community worldwide, we’ve been able to help brands deliver timely messages that resonate with 13 to 34 year olds, who see the world differently than their parent’s generation. This is particularly important against the backdrop of current events, as advertisers look to appropriately align their messages with what our community seeks; positivity, good will, and most-importantly, authenticity. We have partnered with many brands in verticals that are well-positioned in the current environment, such as consumer packaged goods, gaming, streaming, and e-commerce, while also helping our partners with recovery roadmaps for industries that have experienced an outsized impact from COVID-19. We had the opportunity to work closely with Monster Energy to adapt a new campaign for Snapchat in response to stay-at-home orders with their #CrushQuarantine campaign across Snap Ads, Commercials, Story Ads and Lenses. Monster’s multi-ad product exposure ultimately generated a 12 point lift in ad awareness and a 5 point lift in message association. Our large audience, creative formats and advanced measurement tools provided a significant opportunity for brands such as Monster Energy to reach Snapchatters during the global pandemic. Our team has also been working hard to provide useful products and resources for businesses as they manage the current economic landscape. We added multi-country targeting capabilities, allowing advertisers to optimize for the best performing customers, regardless of location, catering to location agnostic products and services, like commerce, fintech, and games. In addition, we launched Places on our Snap Map, which highlights businesses that are popular with our community and offers information like hours, reviews, and delivery options via third party partners. While we are just getting started with this opportunity, as parts of the world begin to reopen safely, we will be there to help the Snapchat Generation support their favorite local businesses and discover new ones. We remain focused on making progress against our ARPU opportunity through our three key priorities. First, investing in our ad platform in order to drive improved relevance and deliver measurable ROI. Second, efficiently scaling our sales and marketing functions to support our advertising partners globally. And third, building innovative ad experiences through video and augmented reality that deliver real business value. Our three priorities along with our unique reach and growing, global audience allow us to drive performance at scale. Since completing the transition to our self-serve ad platform, we have been able to reliably translate improvements in relevance, optimization, and measurement into revenue growth by delivering increased ROI. During a time of disruption, marketers must make difficult decisions. They need flexibility, creativity and strong relationships, but most importantly, they need performant media. Advertisers are becoming more performance-oriented, and the economic conditions only accelerated that trend this quarter. Our flexible and advanced self-serve platform, our strong suite of performance ad products, and our relentless focus on measurement and ROI, continue to help our advertising partners deliver positive results. The global health crisis has also accelerated the shift to a more digital economy. Our advertising partners are exploring more ways to offer services digitally, including at-home fitness apps, online education programs, retail stores and restaurants offering online ordering and delivery services, and mobile-first banking and trading. This crisis is encouraging all business owners to adopt digital marketing methods to engage with their customers globally, and we are well-positioned to take advantage of this shift. Our early investments in building the fundamentals of our global business have paid off, and have resulted in our highest number of active advertisers to date this quarter. We’ve built a full suite of ad products designed to meet advertisers’ needs in this new world, particularly for ecommerce, such as swipe-to-call, pixel-verified purchase, app re-engagement, and Dynamic Ads. We recently launched Dynamic Ads globally, and we are finding that advertisers are already seeing early success with this new ad format. Rob Seidu, Senior Director of Media Activation at Adidas, said "In the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic, Adidas has further accelerated its digital business. With ecommerce a key focus for us in 2020 and beyond, we were excited to Beta test Snapchat’s Dynamic Ads in the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Within weeks we saw 52% growth in return on advertising spend and we have subsequently grown our investment." More and more e-commerce businesses are adopting our Snap pixel to optimize for down-funnel purchase objectives, demonstrating the increased demand we are seeing from businesses measuring campaigns via first party attribution. For example, in Q2 2020 Chipotle launched a new free delivery campaign on Snapchat to drive purchases both on Chipotle.com and within their app. Their campaign drove over 3x the number of attributed purchases compared to their Q1 2020 campaign and 171% increase in return on ad spend compared to the prior quarter. We remain focused on helping businesses such as Chipotle translate measurement and optimization into meaningful conversions and strong ROI. Our second priority is to grow demand through better service of our advertising partners. We continue to hire talented sales professionals to build out and improve our verticalized coverage that serves many advertisers across the globe. While we are not able to host in-person meetings with our advertising partners, our teams have quickly pivoted efforts to virtual industry education, and our team has led thought-leadership webinars during quarantine and partnered with many industry leaders like Shopify and Smartly.io to further educate advertisers about our robust ad tools and capabilities. We are also supporting advertisers by building out more on-demand learning tools such as Snap Focus, which includes six learning courses that walks through everything advertisers need to know to create their first ad campaign. Our third priority is to lead the way with innovative advertising. Over the past five years, we’ve been building a powerful video business with the goal of connecting brands and advertisers to the Snapchat Generation. For example, COVERGIRL Clean Fresh came to Snapchat to get in front of the hard-to- reach Gen Z and Millennial female audience. Their campaign leaned heavily into Premium Video, featuring Snap Select Commercials, Snap Ads and Filters. Of the total audience reach, 62% was unique to Snap. The campaign drove a 9 point lift in Ad Awareness, and a lift in Purchase Intent that was 4.5x the Snap US CPG Norm. This is just one example of many that signals a broader shift in how Gen Z and Millennials consume content. It is getting harder and harder to reach this audience on linear TV or commercial-supported streaming, and it is not just the younger generations, average daily Discover content viewership by people over 35% has increased by over 40% year-over-year. Based on this growth and in response to the evolving needs of our advertising partners, we introduced First Commercial, giving advertisers a way to reserve the first Commercial a Snapchatter sees during the first Show they watch, allowing brands to make that all-important first impression. Our Commercials are designed for both Social Video and Online Video buyers, with the goal of attracting incremental Online Video and TV budgets into our hand-curated, brand-safe content environment. In fact, the content on our Discover platform is brand-safe by design. In order to provide advertisers with fixed priced, reserved inventory next to this content, we introduced Snap Select, where ads only appear in our hand-curated selection of Shows and content from media brands like ESPN, NBC, and People. In Q2 we expanded our Snap Select curated ad placement options to five topics, 'Sports', 'Entertainment', 'Beauty', 'Lifestyle', and 'News', enabling advertisers to reach viewers within each vertical. We believe that the future of customer interactions is immersive. The most engaging and creative ads on our platform are powered by our augmented reality Lenses. Brands from every vertical have worked with us to provide Snapchatters with fun ads that they play with and share with friends. Ultimately we want to enable advertisers with the tools to build the digital layer around their products. For example, we recently launched our augmented reality Lens ‘try-on’ campaign with luxury brand Gucci, which allows Snapchatters to virtually try on and purchase some of Gucci’s most iconic shoes via Snapchat. The Lens was played with by our community for 22 seconds on average and in some markets generated a five times Return on Ad Spend. Snapchatters are actively looking for more and more ways to engage with brands on our platform, and we’re excited to help partners like Gucci connect with them during this time. We believe that AR try-on is going to be incredibly important to the future of commerce and we are excited to work with more partners to build out incredible experiences for our community. Longer-term, we see a significant opportunity for brands to provide utility for Snapchatters while generating real business value across our service – not just via ads in content. Brands are starting to invest in Snapchat beyond advertising by building fun, engaging, and useful experiences for Snapchatters. The launch of Brand Profiles this month, which Evan highlighted earlier, is a key pillar of this future. Today, our focus is on giving Brands a home for all the innovative AR experiences that they create, alongside their stories. In the future, we believe that Snapchatters will engage naturally with businesses of all sizes across our service. For a brand like Target, this could mean they visit the Target Store on the Map to check store hours; use a Mini to find the best offers with friends; try on the latest looks via an AR Lens; and more. In the five years since we launched ads on Snapchat, we’ve created the industry’s first-ever vertical video format, brought branded AR experiences to the mainstream, and pioneered privacy-safe, mobile- first advertising in order to help advertisers everywhere reach our community. We will continue to invest for the long-term by demonstrating measurable ROI for our advertising partners, empowering our teams to speak strategically to the value of our ads, and leading the way with innovative advertising products and services to help advertisers scale. We’ve built a robust advertising platform to reach the Snapchat Generation, who are digitally native and uniquely positioned to help jumpstart the recovery. Given our young and influential community, their depth of engagement on our platform, and our overall opportunity to take share of the growing digital advertising market, we believe we are well- positioned to drive business results for advertisers over the long-term. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Derek.