Snapchat is looking to power up its ad business with new artificial intelligence-powered additions, including a guided ad set-up process, dynamic product ads and updated creative tools.
First, Snapchat is rolling out an AI-powered chatbot within Snapchat Ads Manager. The bot will enable advertisers to describe their goals and get customized guidance on campaign set-up.
Snapchat’s AI assistant will also be able to provide notes on how to correct errors and improve performance, and it can recommend additional enhancements to maximize the potential of ad campaigns.
It’s becoming the norm these days for ad platforms to provide an AI assistant tool to help guide the process, so it makes sense that Snapchat wants to keep up with this emerging trend.
Snapchat also updated its Dynamic Product Ads with “a new class of agentic recommendation models that synthesize user behavior, product affinity, full-funnel signals, and real-time intent to surface the most relevant products with greater precision and stronger performance,” the company said.
In other words, Snapchat’s Dynamic Product Ads will now provide more relevant recommendations to Snapchat users, which could drive improved performance.
Snapchat also added new creative tools, including Smart upscale, which will enhance existing assets for the full-screen, vertical Snapchat format, image-to-video generation and background image enhancement, which will enable marketers to update the context of their visuals.
Snapchat is also opening up its ad platform to third-party AI agents, via its own Model Content Protocol server. This will allow marketers to use the AI tool of their choice to help guide their Snapchat ads approach.
Finally, Snapchat announced a new Snap Creator Network, which is an AI-powered system that aims to simplify creator discovery and campaign activation.
As per Snapchat: “Advertisers can describe the creators they’re looking for — including audience, tone, category, or campaign goals — and Snap Creator Network helps match advertisers with creators that fit their audience and campaign needs. The system streamlines recommendations, outreach, and activation, helping brands move from idea to execution faster.”
The system will ideally help to provide more relevant brand/influencer partnership recommendations, reducing the manual work of assessing creator profiles manually.
Snapchat said that the Creator Network will launch later this year.
These are some handy updates, which move Snapchat’s ad network more in line with the evolving digital marketing landscape by providing conversational, guided tools to help advertisers build more effective campaigns.
And Snapchat needs the business. The platform’s usage declined in Q1 in both the U.S. and Europe, which are the company’s biggest revenue markets. That suggests that the app may have reached market saturation and the cap of its audience growth. If that’s the case, then Snapchat needs to make more money out of its existing audience. Improved targeting tools could be another way to help maximize ad exposure and improve ROI for ad partners.
