Snapchat wants to start making serious money without being creepy

Snapchat has been looking for a way to really exploit its potential as an advertising platform, and marketers have been excited to tap into the service’s wealth of users. During a chat in France this week, Snapchat CEO and founder Evan Spiegel made it clear that, while he wants the company to start making some serious cash, he doesn’t want it to become “creepy” in the process. 

Snapchat’s photos might disappear seconds after its young users open them, but keeping the young social network afloat requires advertising that stick in their minds a little longer than that. In turn, Snapchat’s audience offers an alluring prospect to the advertising industry, which yearns for ways to tap into the overwhelmingly young user base that has flocked to the ephemeral image sharing app. That’s why the company’s 25-year-old CEO and founder Evan Spiegel travelled to Cannes, France this week to pitch his burgeoning advertising business at the industry’s biggest party of the year. Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles sat down with the Stanford dropout during Monday’s keynote before a crowd full of ad execs to talk about Snapchat’s new vertical video ads, the company’s experimentation in the space and — perhaps inevitably — dick pics.