In a time characterised by relentless technological advancements, heritage can sometimes be perceived as a weakness. Today, the word “legacy” is used negatively just as often as it is positively, and even companies that were founded on innovative ideas may struggle to adapt when nimble startups arise to disrupt their markets. With new advances in tech occurring all the time, heritage can, sometimes, be perceived as weakness.
But some organisations are using their history to fuel their future. Here, three very different tech platforms, each with distinct legacies, explain how they are staying ahead of the competition by reimagining their offerings.
Why Yahoo is streamlining its services
Yahoo is one of the few extant pioneers of the early internet age. Founded in 1994, the platform is remembered by many as the domain for their earliest email addresses or the search engine they’d play with, back when search engines were still novel.
As the digital landscape evolved over the years, Yahoo’s offering expanded to everything from news to financial advice. Now, says Alice Beecroft, the company’s senior director of global strategy and partnerships, the vision is all about simplicity. “We’ve taken a step back and decided to stop trying to be everything for everyone,” she says. “We’re simplifying the message and concentrating on what we do best.”
For Yahoo, this means doubling down on digital media and advertising services. The company is now focused on delivering finance, sports and news content and offering high-impact adtech solutions to its clients.
Three ways Yahoo is reimagining its offering
Building user-centric innovation that resonates
First, Yahoo had to decide which legacy elements in wanted to keep and what new features it wished to add. This all starts with the consumer.
“It’s all about understanding what the user wants,” says Beecroft. “It’s that simple. On the media side, we are there to provide good editorial content. With Yahoo Mail, we want to make life easier for people. The second you start to become too clever or make it too complicated, you lose people.”
For long-time users, she says, this means protecting the name, which carries a lot of nostalgia, and providing the same excellent service. For newer customers, it means developing offerings specifically for them – for example a new influencer portal and AI-powered shopability feature in Yahoo Mail for a younger generation of users.
Using AI to elevate human work
Conversations about AI’s role in the workplace aren’t going away any time soon. But, for Beecroft, the way forward is simple. “I firmly believe that to drive long-term brand equity with customers you need to have that human element of understanding. AI is a tool, not a replacement.”
Beecroft’s team uses a generative AI tool to analyse all of Yahoo’s insights and research, enabling them to interrogate data in a fraction of the time it had previously taken. “You can focus on what you can discover rather than spending all that time putting data into tables. I can then take the people originally focused on cleaning and presenting data and get them working on strategy or out in front of clients.”
Building long-term, data-driven partnerships
Finally, Yahoo is reimagining its future through a number B2B collaborations. “Data underpins a lot of the partnerships that we have now,” says Beecroft. “We have a huge footprint globally. What that enables us to do is interconnect with partners, where they also have a large amount of data, to be able to offer something unique to our clients.”
One such collaboration was between Yahoo and VIOOH, an advertising marketplace. In this partnership, Yahoo’s wealth of first-party data allowed advertisers to enhance the effectiveness of their programmatic digital-out-of-home (DOOH) campaigns by targeting and retargeting audiences across both DOOH screens and digital channels.
How Reddit is capitalising on community
Reddit, another scion of the early internet days, turned 20 this year. The online forum and media platform is the ninth most-visited website in the world, according to data by Similarweb, and has long been a first port-of-call for news, advice and fandoms. “Reddit provides a core human need, which is belonging,” says Roxy Young, its chief marketing officer.
To thrive in the modern digital age, Reddit is using the power of community to help marketers better understand their audiences.
Three ways Reddit is reimagining its offering
Community intelligence
Last month, the organisation launched an AI-powered social listening tool called Reddit Insights. “We have billions of posts and comments, all organised by interest in topic communities,” Young says. “We can aggregate, synthesise and analyse all of that in seconds, which is an amazing tool to help marketers shape their targeting strategy.”
Exploring what matters to communities and sharing those findings with advertisers isn’t new to Reddit. AI, however, has made the process significantly faster. “This used to take us weeks and weeks,” says Young. “Now we can do it instantaneously.”
Innovative ad formats
Reddit is also experimenting with new advertising formats. Conversation-summary add-ons, for instance, enable marketers to pull positive feedback on their brands straight from real Reddit conversations and add it to online campaigns, including on social media.
These “mini testimonials”, as Young describes them, can serve as powerful brand endorsements. “In the early tests we’ve been doing, we’re seeing a 19% improvement in click-through rates,” she says.
Trust and transparency
Of course, firms must be cautious when using real-life community conversations for advertising purposes. Many of Reddit’s users come to the platform because they feel they can have safe, authentic discussions, free from the ulterior motives of advertisers. Any innovation must therefore be done in partnership with these communities, says Young.
“At Reddit, we are nothing without our communities,” she says. “We have a variety of programmes to educate moderators on the upcoming roadmap – they can weigh in, provide feedback and help co-create and guide the product.”
She adds that before a user’s comment can be used in a conversation summary add-on, the user must be notified. Although this is not a legal requirement, Young believes it’s the right thing to do. “The community has come to understand that Reddit is a business and, if we want to continue to invest in making great community-building tools, we need to bring brands on board too.”
Snapchat is harnessing the power of the real world
Snapchat launched as an upstart social media challenger in 2011. Principally popular with young generations (at the time, younger millennials and older zoomers), the platform was designed to “mimic the types of conversations you had with friends and family around the dinner table or out at a bar”, says Ronan Harris, president of the company’s EMEA region. With its disappearing messages, “you don’t have to worry that something you post is going to come back to haunt you – you can have fun and crack jokes and not everyone in the world is going to see it.”
Three ways Snapchat is reimagining its offering
Monetising core communication
Even challenger brands must find a way to keep innovating, particularly when it comes to working with marketers. As with Reddit, this means understanding how users engage with a platform and finding new, meaningful ways to reach them.
Snapchat introduced ads to the chat section of the app – the area that sees the most traffic – for instance. “It’s the first time we’ve introduced monetisation,” says Harris. “The initial tests have been super good and we think it’s going to open up a whole new set of inventory but also an exciting new format.”
Augmented reality for real-world utility
Augmented reality (AR) has been central to Snapchat’s appeal for a while, but, in 2025, it enables users to do far more than simply see what they’d look like with cat ears. “The entertainment piece has always been there,” says Harris. “But there are real-world applications, too, for shopping and in the wider cultural landscape.”
Harris points to the ‘try-on’ features for ads launched by clothing retailers or a recent collaboration with the Department of Egyptology at the Louvre, which enables users to aim their phones at some of the faded relics in the museum and watch as bright colours bring the hieroglyphics back to life.
Combating disengagement
And Snapchat is taking augmented reality a step further in 2026 by launching Specs, a lightweight AI- and AR-powered upgrade of the company’s smart glasses. Harris believes it is exactly Snapchat’s legacy that positions them as the right players to do this.
“We’ve invested in AR for a long time,” he says. “Up to 80% of daily Snapchat users engage with AR on a daily basis and we feel very fortunate that we’ve trained this huge population to be comfortable with the technology.”
Harris believes that Specs is a natural evolution in the organisation’s mission to mimic and extend the real world. “Just today, six people nearly walked into me because they were staring at their phones,” he explains. “What Specs aims to do is give you an opportunity to stop looking at your toes and enjoy the world around you – and you can decide if you want to invite the digital world to be part of that or not. Technology needs to stop being an interface between us and everything that we experience, to create a more seamless interaction with the real world.”
While not every company has the resources or capabilities to build new technologies, any organisation can learn a valuable lesson from Yahoo, Snapchat and Reddit: a brand’s heritage is built on and by its consumers. All three of these brands used their deep understanding of their users’ behaviour and needs to fuel their future.
In a time characterised by relentless technological advancements, heritage can sometimes be perceived as a weakness. Today, the word “legacy” is used negatively just as often as it is positively, and even companies that were founded on innovative ideas may struggle to adapt when nimble startups arise to disrupt their markets. With new advances in tech occurring all the time, heritage can, sometimes, be perceived as weakness.
But some organisations are using their history to fuel their future. Here, three very different tech platforms, each with distinct legacies, explain how they are staying ahead of the competition by reimagining their offerings.
