Snapchat used its Cannes Lions stage to unveil Reset Velocity™, new proprietary research arguing that consumer conversations about brands are accelerating away from public, performative feeds and into private chats with small, trusted circles.
The launch, hosted at The Empower Cafe under the banner The Great Brand Reset: From Attention to Connection, brought together Ronan Harris, President EMEA at Snapchat; behavioural scientist Lea Karam, whose consultancy Mindscope conducted the study; brand strategist Eugene Healy; and business journalist Massimo Marioni.
Speaking to Communicate Online after the panel, Harris said the value of the work is that it puts a number on a behavioural shift the industry had long sensed but not measured.
“They’ve been able to measure the velocity of which change is happening,” he said. “The primary shift is people moving away from performative public spaces and moving their conversations around brands and products into private spaces with small networks of their most intimate friends and family.”
For Harris, the findings are not just sociologically interesting, they are a brief for the industry. “It’s incredibly important for marketeers and brand owners to understand this shift because it means we all need to change how we are thinking about our creativity, our messaging and our way of building relationships with our consumers.”
He argued the discomfort for CMOs will be as much operational as creative. Marketing has been built on the immediate gratification of visible reach: the TV spot that airs, the OOH placement you can drive past, the platform dashboard that refreshes in real time. That feedback loop, he suggested, is no longer where the meaningful action sits.
“A CMO has got to think about, well, how do I show up in a very human way? How do I create a moment of human connection for my potential consumer and my brand? And how do I get comfortable with that becoming the start of a conversation that that consumer then has with their immediate network?”
The harder discipline, he added, is patience. “It’s a shift of being able to move away from the immediate satisfaction of seeing the creative play to building brands over time and measuring those bonds as they grow over time.”
