Snapchat will soon start experimenting with displaying brand-sponsored messages alongside friends’ chat threads, said CEO Evan Spiegel in a letter to staff recently published on the company’s website.
The Sponsored Snaps will appear as unread messages in the app’s main chat tab. According to the letter, they will appear without a push notification and opening the messages will be optional for users. This is the first time Snapchat will show ads in the most-used part of its app. The company did not confirm when the Sponsored Snaps will be available in Canada.
In the letter, Spiegel says the Snaps will allow advertisers to interact with potential customers throughout the conversion funnel, all within a single ad unit. The move aims to strengthen the company’s advertising business, which Spiegel claims has been growing more slowly than its competitors.
Although the social network’s community has grown to 850 million people, and time spent viewing content increased by 25% globally in the second quarter of this year, Snap investors are concerned that the digital advertising business is not growing fast enough, Spiegel said.
“As we look ahead to 2025, we need to grow our lower funnel business even faster while simultaneously reaccelerating the growth of our upper funnel business,” Spiegel said. “We’re going to do that by changing the way that we go to market, introducing new ad placements powered by automation, and continuing to invest in our machine learning platform to deliver powerful results for our advertising partners.”
In the coming months, the company will begin displaying more actionable information to advertisers based on interactions – it will bring data together in a single self-service tool that will further convert this information into actionable recommendations. “[That] will allow us to demonstrate the power of our differentiated platform to advertisers while giving them the tools they need to resonate with the Snapchat community,” Spiegel said.
Snapchat is also looking to enable more messaging features powered by generative AI and integrated into advertisers’ CRMs to help its partners communicate with their customers at scale. In addition, it’s working on new ways for brands to collaborate with creators to develop creative ads and promote their products.
The company announced Sponsored Snaps following the launch of new updates in Canada aimed at increasing online safety for teens. The updates came after nine Ontario school boards and two private schools filed a lawsuit against the app, TikTok and Meta in May, alleging that students are experiencing an attention, learning and mental health crisis due to addictive social media use.
