P&G digital media exec Craig Stimmel joins Snap

Dive Brief:

Procter & Gamble is losing Craig Stimmel — who oversaw the CPG giant's global media and digital partnerships with platforms such as Facebook and Google — to Snapchat parent company Snap. He worked at P&G for eight years and left at the end of July to join Snap as the head of brand partnerships next week, Business Insider reported.
Stimmel is credited with overhauling P&G's digital media business in North America and helping to implement a strategy of integrating creative and media that was championed by Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard. P&G brought much of its media buying and first-party data gathering in-house during Stimmel's tenure. By cutting media waste by 20%, P&G expects to save $1 billion in agency and production fees over five years, per Business Insider.
Stimmel will be based in Chicago and will focus on boosting Snap's ad sales to Fortune 500 brands. P&G hasn't announced a replacement for Stimmel yet, a spokesperson told the Cincinnati Business Courier.

Dive Insight:

Stimmel's hiring comes as Snapchat regains some of its momentum and as parent company Snap beefs up its executive ranks after a year of managerial turmoil, declining user base and plummeting stock price. Snap in April hired Kenny Mitchell, McDonald's former marketing VP, as its first CMO. Snap also hired Jeremi Gorman, Amazon's former head of ad sales, as chief business officer; Jared Grusd, Huffington Post's former CEO, as a chief strategy officer; and Julie Henderson, former EVP and chief communications officer for 21st Century Fox, as chief communications officer.

By hiring Stimmel, Snap gains a seasoned marketing executive with client-side experience in working with digital media companies. P&G spends about $7 billion a year on advertising, and about one-third of that goes to digital media. As a major advertiser, P&G's pronouncements about digital media resonate throughout the marketing industry. Pritchard this year issued a call to reinvent the digital media supply chain as efforts to clean up the current ecosystem have proven futile in the face of rapid growth.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is familiar with Stimmel's work, and even quoted the marketing executive during a February earnings call with analysts. According to Spiegel, Stimmel told Snap executives that "to continue driving growth across our businesses, it is critical to connect with Gen Z and millennials; Snapchat has been an important part in that strategy." Spiegel also said Snap had built a self-serve ad platform to serve as a foundation for scaling up growth this year.

Meanwhile, Snap this year has regained momentum with a growing user base and rising sales. The number of Snapchat users grew 8% to 203 million in Q2 from a year earlier on the strength of its redesigned Android app and managerial changes. The overhauled app opens faster and has fewer bugs than a prior version that reportedly dissuaded some people from using it. Downloads of the Android app surged 37% in Q2 from a year earlier, per research firm SimilarWeb.

Earlier this year, Snap hosted its first Partner Summit, where it announced several initiatives to support the developer and creative communities. This month, the company expanded its lineup of vertical video programming with original shows aimed at expanding its audience and boosting engagement among existing users.