Coworking with Fintan Gillespie

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Fintan Gillespie is global director, ad partnerships at Snap Inc. He previously worked at Google.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? A recent favorite has been launching our integration with WooCommerce. It’s a big step forward in making Snapchat’s ad tools more accessible to a wider range of SMB e-commerce businesses. By giving WooCommerce merchants a seamless way to create, manage, and optimize Snapchat campaigns directly from their storefronts, we’re helping them show up where their customers are already spending time. It builds on the success of our established Shopify integration, and speaks to what we’re all about: lowering the barrier to entry for high-impact, creative advertising that actually drives results.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I love when multiple partners get involved to make a campaign come to life. One example that really caught my eye this year was when Steve Madden worked with one of our agency partners, January Digital, to reach new customers on Snapchat. Through that campaign development, they worked with another one of our social agency partners, Whalar, on an entire creator strategy.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: You can definitely guess it because it’s on there, but it’s worth mentioning: I was a travel journalist right out of uni. I traveled across the world from Australia to Ireland, raising funds for a men’s health charity. I wrote a weekly article throughout the trip, documenting this journey. I’ve always been an incredibly curious person, and telling stories through people and places really fed that at that time in my life. I’m happy to say that the curiosity hasn’t waned.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Brands having more one-to-one interactions with customers, like Snapchat’s Sponsored Snaps. We recently conducted research that revealed 86% of social media users in the US are open to getting messages from brands on apps like Snapchat, Messenger, and others. Chat is a meaningful place for engagement. I’m really excited to see how this continues to impact brands and how they connect with their audiences.

I’m a pretty optimistic guy, so instead of what I’m worried about, I’ll share where I think there’s a ton of opportunity. And that lies in measurement. Some may feel like campaign reporting is the Wild West. So many platforms analyze data from manual data pulls to try and understand the full picture. Helping our clients understand the full impact of their paid media and social strategies is something I think a lot about. It’s critical to figure out what works there, and I think everyone from performance marketers and their agency partners, all the way up to brand CMOs and CFOs will be thinking about this in 2026.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? Working in ad tech, I always listen to the ADSN podcast hosted by my former colleagues James Borow and Daniel Druger. They have an eye for where the industry is going. More broadly, I’m always inspired by How I Built This and the Acquired Podcast.

These views do not necessarily speak for the company, but instead are the personal responses from individuals.