‘He had no ad or media background’: Ad industry executives react to Snapchat losing chief strategy officer Imran Khan

Reuters

• Snap’s chief strategy chief Imran Khan is leaving, the
  company said Monday.
• Ad executives say that they while Khan steering Snap to an
  IPO was commendable, he was never a good fit in a strategy role.
• He was also not as hands-on as they’d have liked him to be
  and shares a part for the blame for allowing Snapchat’s
  disastrous redesign to go through, execs say. 

Snap’s chief strategy chief Imran Khan is leaving, the company
said Monday, becoming the latest executive to depart its top
ranks. 

And even though he leaves a big hole for founder and CEO Evan
Spiegel to fill —advertising executives aren’t particularly sorry
to see Khan go.

Khan was necessary for Snap’s IPO — but invisible after

Khan, 41, joined Snap in early 2015, with a mandate to expand its
business and revenue and steer it toward an initial
public offering.

He was the perfect person for the latter job, having
been hired from Credit Suisse where he was head of
global internet investment banking — and was best known for his
leading role on the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group’s IPO
in 2014.

“When you look at what he’s been able to accomplish while there,
it’s pretty incredible,” said Ethan Agarwal, founder and CEO of
Aaptiv, a small business that has worked with Snap. “The guy
brought Snap from pre-revenue to over a billion-dollar run rate,
helped grow it from 100 to 3,000 employees, and essentially
brought a company running on Quickbooks to IPO.”

But while he succeeded in charting the company’s path to an IPO,
insiders and outsiders apparently never saw him as an advertising
guy.

“Internally and externally, folks never thought Imran was a good
fit in that strategy role — he had no ad or media
background,” an advertising executive who wished to remain
anonymous told Business Insider. “It made a lot of sense for him
to help get Snap to IPO, and considerably less sense after that.”

“He was needed because Evan wasn’t a business person, and Wall
Street needed an experienced adult to take them public,” said
another executive. “He was more a factor when he first joined.
Once the company went public he was invisible.”

Ad executives say that Khan wasn’t as hands-on as they’d have
liked

That’s not to say he didn’t try. Khan helped Snap build a strong
base for its ad business, tried to forge deeper relationships
with Madison Avenue and helped the company transition to
selling ads programatically

But some executives said that Khan wasn’t as hands-on as they’d
have liked him to be.

“He was never about ads and we hardly saw him,” said an
executive. “He never really came to our agency, or attended
meetings around Snap and our usage of it.”

Others, however say that although he never claimed to be an ad
guy, he was accommodating.

“Any time I texted him saying that I wanted to catch up, he’d say
I’ll see you tomorrow,” said a third ad executive. “I have a lot
of respect for him.”

Snapchat
has come under fire internally for what has been described as a
“toxic” culture.

Dado
Ruvic/Reuters

Snap’s disastrous redesign was a strategic misstep

Snap rolled out the biggest ever
redesign in its history last December —  a move
that was wildly unpopular among users and set its
stock plunging. While it was eventually reversed, the damage
was permanent. 

According to Aaron Perez, director of digital and social strategy
at ad agency Glow, Khan shares a part for the blame for allowing
the redesign to go through. He called it “a strategic misstep.”

“That move demonstrated that he was out of touch with
culture and how users want to engage with the platform,” he said.
“When the redesign happened, it shook several core users
off  the app and made advertisers even more wary of
investing in the platform.”

There is no denying that the company has struggled — both
commercially and in terms of users and usage — relative to
earlier optimistic expectations that were widely held, said
Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser.

“While user and usage trends are Evan Spiegel’s responsibility,
commercial matters are Khan’s,” he said. “Of course, if usage
trends were meaningfully better it’s possible the business would
have been better.”

Khan’s departure makes Snap more vulnerable than ever — but
all may not be lost

Khan’s final day on the job has not been set, and he will help in
the transition of his duties and responsibilities, Snap said,
clarifying that his departure did not stem from any disagreement
relating to accounting, strategy, management, operations,
policies, or practices. 

“Imran has been a great partner building our business,” Snap CEO
Evan Spiegel said in an SEC filing. “We appreciate all of his
hard work and wish him the best.”

Still, Khan’s exit does not come at a good time for Snap, with
the company reeling from its first-ever quarterly decline in
daily users as a public company last quarter, and its shares
dropping more than 30% since the beginning of the year. 

“As the stock has fallen, stock-based compensation is less
valuable to employees who might have been counting on a higher
stock price to justify why they were staying with the company,”
said Pivotal’s Wieser. “[This is a] particularly big risk for
Snap given how much they were using stock for compensation and
may contribute to more departure risks.”

But others said that Snap’s voluntary exit may set the stage for
someone with a more traditional ad background to take the reins
and help turn the company around. In fact,
Snap just hired WarnerMedia’s former chief marketing officer to
run its sales.

“I would actually say this is a sign of righting the ship,” said
an executive. “Not it sinking.”