Grace Kao

Chief Marketing Officer Snap Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Grace Kao is Chief Marketing Officer of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, and her promotion in April 2025 was unusually fast — she had been Snap’s VP of Consumer and Business Marketing for less than six months. She arrived at a specific moment: Snap had been without a chief marketing officer for roughly two years, was running its senior marketing mandate through Chief Creative Officer Colleen DeCourcy, and was heading into its NewFronts advertiser showcase needing to make a case to media buyers. Kao’s background is exactly the one that argument requires. She spent close to four years as Head of Global Business Marketing at Instagram and then two years in the same role at Spotify, where she led the ‘Spreadbeats’ campaign — a B2B piece of work that became one of the most decorated initiatives at Cannes Lions in 2024. Before any of the platforms, she spent well over a decade in advertising agencies. She is, in other words, a business marketer who sells advertising to advertisers, brought in at a company whose revenue depends on exactly that.

Career Highlights

• Promoted to Chief Marketing Officer of Snap Inc. in April 2025, effective immediately, after less than six months as the company’s VP of Consumer and Business Marketing.
• Became Snap’s first chief marketing officer in roughly two years, taking over senior marketing from Chief Creative Officer Colleen DeCourcy, who had joined in May 2022 and moved to an advisory role before leaving later in 2025.
• Timed into the role ahead of Snap’s 2025 NewFronts presentation, the annual event at which digital platforms pitch their advertising inventory to media buyers.
• Led Spotify Advertising’s ‘Spreadbeats’ campaign, which Snap describes as one of the most honoured initiatives of 2024 at the Cannes Lions awards — a rare feat for business-to-business creative work.
• Head of Global Business Marketing at Spotify from February 2023 to January 2025.
• Head of Global Business Marketing at Instagram from May 2019 to February 2023, spanning both the business and creator sides of the platform.
• Spent the late 1990s through the early 2010s at the agencies TBWA\Chiat\Day and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, working on Pepsi, Apple, Sony and HP.
• Named to Adweek’s Top 50 Indispensable Business Leaders.
• Has directed campaigns for Pepsi, PlayStation, Crate & Barrel and Apple across more than twenty years in marketing and advertising.

Professional Journey

Kao’s career began on the agency side, at two of the most creatively decorated shops in American advertising. She worked at TBWA\Chiat\Day and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners from the late 1990s into the early 2010s, a period in which she led work for Pepsi, Apple, Sony and HP. Snap’s own account of her career adds PlayStation and Crate & Barrel to the client list. That is a classic brand-advertising apprenticeship: big consumer accounts, campaign-led, agency-side.

She then moved client-side and specifically into platform business marketing — the discipline of marketing an advertising product to the people who buy advertising, rather than marketing a consumer product to consumers. She held marketing leadership roles at Yahoo and at Pandora, though no source located gives her titles at either. From May 2019 she was Head of Global Business Marketing at Instagram for close to four years, covering both the business and creator sides of the platform, during the period when Instagram was building out Reels and creator monetisation and needed to convince advertisers that attention had moved there.

In February 2023 she took the equivalent role at Spotify. The work that defines that period is ‘Spreadbeats’, Spotify Advertising’s B2B campaign — a piece of marketing aimed at media buyers that nonetheless became one of the most awarded initiatives at Cannes Lions in 2024. B2B creative rarely wins at that level, and it is the credential that most directly explains her hire.

She joined Snap in late 2024 as VP of Consumer and Business Marketing. In April 2025, with the company approaching NewFronts and having gone about two years without a CMO, Snap elevated her to Chief Marketing Officer effective immediately. Colleen DeCourcy, the Chief Creative Officer who had carried the senior marketing mandate since May 2022, moved into an advisory capacity to support the transition and left the company later in 2025. Kao remains in the role as of this review, per Snap’s own executive team page.

She lives in San Francisco with her husband, two children and a cat.

Education

Stanford University

Master’s degree, Communications

No undergraduate degree is stated in any source located for this review.