054: Snapchat's Chris Vail

Boston Speaks Up

Guest Chris Vail is a Senior Account Executive for Political and Advocacy Partnerships at Snapchat. A former Amazon ad sales leader, Vail made the move to Snapchat to help onboard legislative, issue, and non-profit advertisers onto the Snapchat platform. His team recently launched an augmented reality lens for the Mark Kelly campaign in Arizona, which was the first Senate campaign to lean in on this new, experiential way of engaging voters. Snapchat has also made news waves recently for signing up more than 750,000 young voters via its Snapchat app (and now it’s crossed 1 million registered voters). Prior to Snapchat, Vail headed up sales for Downstream, a fast-growing Amazon product marketing startup. He began his media career as a planner and buyer for a large D.C. political shop. In 2014, he migrated from politics to ecommerce, moved from D.C. to Seattle and landed at Amazon to help build out its (at the time) small digital ads team. He spearheaded the expansion of Amazon’s ad business into New York, Toronto and Boston, where he eventually moved with his family.