[00:00:00] Phillip: And welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip.

[00:00:04] Brian: I'm Brian.

[00:00:05] Phillip: And things are heating up around here. We are talking social commerce. We're talking creators. We're continuing this conversation that we've talked about, the global evolution of the way that people make decisions in buying things. It's such a broad conversation these days, Brian, about social platforms, competition of social. I sat on the stage at SOCOM LA with a bunch of rival platforms that were duking it out, and none the least of which was our next guest. And to represent them, we have the Global Vice President of SMB and Mid-Market at Snap Inc. And in his role, he serves a cross-functional team, spanning business dev, marketing, growth, operations, customer success. And I think we're going to get a real sense of what's happening over at Snap these days and how they're growing in both culture and commerce. Welcome to the show, Sid Malhotra.

[00:00:59] Sid: Thank you so much for having me, Phillip and Brian. I appreciate the conversation deeply.

[00:01:04] Phillip: Yeah, I'm excited. You're coming to us from the Creator Lounge over at Snap.

[00:01:08] Sid: I am. It's a cool place for great conversations, which I'm hoping this will be.

[00:01:12] Phillip: Yeah. It's going to be. You're doing the creating. People are creating on the platform every day. Give us a sense of where Snap is right now and the size and the scale of the platform and where you guys are focused on making investments.

[00:01:26] Sid: Yeah. Look, ultimately, I'm going to speak to the audience that you speak to every day, the commerce leaders. Every time I speak to such leaders across the world in my job that I have the great fortune of, I hear, no matter what community or country they're serving, Phillip, I hear this one question. Hey, isn't Snapchat just a bunch of babies and teens running around? And I get it. I get where the question comes from. Like, look, as a service, we are into our teens. We'll be celebrating our fifteenth birthday this year, right?

[00:01:59] Phillip: Happy birthday.

[00:02:00] Sid: Yeah, and what's really fascinating behind that question is this conception around what Snapchat is, right? Right now, Snapchat has nearly 1,000,000,000 monthly active people around the world, and that's a fact that not many businesses around the world know about, right? And really, with that community, we've also seen a very strong appeal and, of course, a younger demographic. But in this time, this about fifteen years of lifespan we've had, they've also aged together with us, right? Imagine someone who started using Snapchat right out of college. At this point in time, they've sought their first few jobs. They probably started a family and bought a house and are doing consumer durable spending, right? Somebody who was in their first job right now probably has kids at this moment and is thinking of schooling and college for them. And so this particular generation has grown in spending power, and what's fascinating is that they have remained with the app. They love the service. In fact, opening it sometimes up to 30 times a day, right? And so when you think about that incremental audience as a business owner, as a commerce leader, this particular fact may not be lost on you, right? And so what we've also seen at that point is, as a business leader, why should I care about that? So the next question I get asked after that, "Hey, babies and teens," is the question around, well, is this really incremental? Like, why can't I find these people elsewhere? And what we're finding in data, that's actually not true.

[00:03:28] Sid: You can't find many of these people with other platforms. Gone are the days when people would just flock to every platform for different use cases and stay there. What we're finding now are, for instance, almost 40% of daily US Snapchatters between 16 and 64, you won't find them on TikTok daily. Like, nearly 80% of them, you won't find on Pinterest daily. So truly we've come into the age where people are loving a few services and are hanging onto them and are creating their own personal community within those. And that really brings me to the final question that Snapchat is trying to answer for businesses and brands worldwide. Where are your next first customers? Where are your next new customers? It is there where the biggest unlock for brands is, right? And third parties are validating this. In fact, Measured just came out with a report that said the median incremental return on ad spend with Snapchat grew 104% in the six-month period from October to March '26 compared to April to September last year. And we see that with brands too, like Comfrt as an example. I was speaking to Hudson a while ago when Hudson and the Comfrt team wanted to find new customers. This is a DTC hoodie brand. I love their hoodies, by the way. One of the most comfortable things I wear on a plane. They came to Snapchat for that. And right now they found 79% new customers and nearly a third increase in revenue.

[00:05:05] Brian: Super interesting. Yeah. I think it feels like the reason for that is that this is such a contained ecosystem. This is, to your point earlier, like, so if you're not advertising on Snap or engaging with Snapchatters, then you're missing out, because they're not actively seeing ads or engaging with content on other platforms as much. And so the primary way that you'd be able to access those people is through this platform. So what does this mean for the approach to how to engage the platform? Because it feels like it is really contained. It is a unique format. Is it, you know, is it through ads? Is it through influencers and creators? Like, it seems like this has its own culture to it, sort of dictated by the format.

[00:05:57] Sid: Yeah. I think there's two ways to think about that question. It's a fascinating one and one that we're asking ourselves every day. Look, I will go back to the basics. If you're a brand in commerce space, we've all been taught, when I was growing up at least, that the buyer's journey is a funnel. Like, you get to awareness,

[00:06:16] Phillip: Right, yeah.

[00:06:17] Sid: And then you get to consideration in the middle, and then you finally convert at the bottom. The problem, no one told the consumers that. And then what ends up happening is, well, people actually move a little bit more fluidly across platforms, across journeys, and they do things differently now, right? The best way I can demonstrate this, Phillip, while we were talking earlier, right, is a personal story from my household now. So here's what happened, right? My son's birthday was a few months ago, and our older one, our daughter, decided to be the chief gift decider. Fantastic.

[00:06:53] Phillip: I have one of those.

[00:06:54] Sid: Yes, exactly, right? And, well, first of all, a job that can definitely be delegated. But more importantly, she knows he loves Hot Wheels, right? He's been watching a show about the cars, so she went about researching Hot Wheels videos from a lot of young creators she knows he loves. Now, went about, checked a few marketplaces that you and I both will do, even asked her favorite LLM chat agent because, well, that's all the rage right now, added something to a cart, but then waited for the price to drop. She added two things, like one or two different garages, which I called her dad win right there.

[00:07:33] Brian: Now we're talking.

[00:07:35] Sid: And so what ended up happening was she ended up buying like two days later. Now that got me thinking, this journey is not actually quite unique. This is happening on a daily basis everywhere around the world, right? And increasingly decisions are happening in these chat and private spaces. Friends swapping links about what to wear to a concert, what to read, what first credit card to apply for, right? The stakes on these decisions are very different.

[00:08:01] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:08:02] Sid: And so what we're finding now, especially with AI coming together, Brian, is this shift from people searching for not even just information or things, but searching for answers now.

[00:08:15] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:08:16] Sid: And so in that age, you end up in that necessity where, as a brand, you don't need to just show up as one of the links on a search query, right? Or just a link at the end of a short-form video. You really need to understand how to be the answer to the question of what's the best Hot Wheels garage to basically give to my brother, right? And that's where I think conversational channels are ready for commerce and conversation at the same time. And that's where I think Snapchat plays a very big role right now.

[00:08:50] Phillip: There's such an interesting development too in the way that people are making those social purchase decisions because, like you said before, chat is at the center of it. Right? Group dynamics and group decisions are at the center of it. It's more multiplayer now than it has ever been. Part of that multiplayer decision making is happening in LLMs. Right? It's just, it's changing the expectation of the UI. And because that UI is also chat-centric, it leads us to have the same relationship in the answer engine that we have in the friendship modality relationship that we have elsewhere. And so the same relationship you have with your answer engine that you're having in the same format, in the same style, in the same UX modality that you have in now the social media component, where you're making the same sorts of purchase decisions. And so where I think it's really interesting is that you were saying that, I think we'd pulled the stat in some of our research that one in four Snapchatters is 35 or older. This is happening across the spectrum. Right? It's across a lot of demographics and firmographics. But we're, this is being trained even at a very young age now, and we're making purchase decisions at a very young age. And this only becomes more cemented now in your purchasing behavior in this very young age. And I can only begin to posit what that might do as they get older and come into more purchasing power. So I'm just curious too, you have the data. You were at Shop Talk. We were just at Shop Talk. We did a lot of content there. I believe you were talking about the frontier for the generation. You said it's chat. What other behavioral shifts are you seeing? And is there anything more to say about that? Because I know video is very much still core and centric to the platform. Creators are very much still part of it. Like, I know we're talking about a psychosocial relationship, but parasocial relationships still very much drive the bulk of these purchasing decisions.

[00:11:10] Brian: To the point in your story, like, the point of the decision was actually due to those creators. It's that, like, when and who to buy from, like, the channel ended up being an LLM sort of passive commerce moment, but the objects to buy were still inspired by a creator and influencer, and the point of decision had already happened in your daughter's mind. So she was just waiting for the right place to buy.

[00:11:39] Sid: Yeah. It's fascinating, Brian. And frankly, I'm so energized by that question, because we've just had ten minutes of discussion and we haven't used the word AI.

[00:11:48] Brian: Oh, right.

[00:11:49] Sid: Yeah. In a second, we'll get there too, but I think this is so pertinent that brands get lost with a lot of stuff that's happening around, but then don't go back to the basics. Here's the basic that we're seeing right now. Chat is in our name. People come to Snapchat to chat, right? In fact, what we see here is in 2025 alone, we had almost 2,000,000,000,000 snaps being created. 2,000,000,000,000. And we had to double-check the math on it. That's like if all of us were in an NFL stadium and we took out our phones and created a snap, and we kept doing that every second of the year.

[00:12:32] Phillip: Wow, that's unfathomable.

[00:12:34] Sid: This behavior is not only endemic to our platform, it's actually endemic to how all of us as people in communities want to behave with each other. And what I think social media, took it a little bit in a different direction, was this peer pressure of a lot of things that had things on display for a lot of people to see, and what we missed out was this craving for private spaces, and chat has become that. This is not to discount the element that, hey, people still want video consumption. In fact, Snapchat was the pioneer of short-form video content as well. And so what we're seeing is, with commerce coming together with conversation, there's a different way for brands to talk now. Gone are the days when polished TV commercials would work, right? You need to be authentic. You need to be in the moment. You need to be conversational. So when we see these brands take that journey of actually talking in authentic tones where the intent is not to do a hard sell, the intent is to just talk about the space or the product or the service a little bit and let the consumer make the decision, we find success. Second, creators are the center of that question. Gone are the days where we would also have brands around these polished commercials that would create over-the-top imagery of what the product would look like. We're talking to real people, and what creators are doing is allowing a human face that looks like me, talks like me, has the same values as me, and so I listen to that creator a lot more. Let's go back to Comfrt for an instance, right? The direct-to-consumer brand that started selling hoodies like pretty much a few years ago. Who knew that would be one of the fastest growing D2C brands to take on a market of hoodies, right? This is a product that has been known to our consumers for generations now.

[00:14:30] Phillip: And very crowded, right?

[00:14:32] Sid: Exactly, very crowded. So how do you win in that space? Comfrt realized two things. Number one, you had to get to a platform where their next first customers were. They did some research on the early buyers of their Comfrt hoodies and they found out most of them would be on Snapchat. So finding the service where your next customer is versus finding the service where your ad impression is showing 100 times a day, that's the key difference. Second thing they realized was they enlisted a lot of creators and they didn't do a lot of editorial content control on their marketing. They let creators and the community inform what messages do resonate and then finally leaned into the chat really well. What we're finding is when brands do that, they get deeply entrenched in the consumer behavior, which is to chat with each other, which is to get into a conversation and ultimately see an increase in conversions, whether you're selling something on an app or something on a website. This is the piece that's very basic to the consumer behavior shift we're seeing in data internally within Snapchat.

[00:15:34] Phillip: You just connected a bunch of dots there, so like, to letting creators of community inform messages, right, and leaning into chat. But for an SMB operator in particular, which is sort of under your remit, what's the first concrete step then to getting out of what I think you've called is last-click jail? And how should they change the campaign objective and maybe, from an attribution window perspective, what they're optimizing for? What's your take on that and how might they use Snap to do it?

[00:16:08] Sid: Yeah. I'm so glad you asked me that question, the last-click jail. Quite frankly, I've suffered from it myself. I ran a small business. This is a community I've been serving for about two decades now, so very near and dear to my heart. Look, for context, essentially, last-click measurement systems are great at telling where the purchase took place. Right? Mhmm. But it doesn't tell you a lot more than that.

[00:16:36] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:16:36] Sid: It's kind of like trying to watch a movie by just watching the last scene. It's sure, you know how the movie ended, but you have no idea what the main characters were doing, what the plotline was, and what got them here. Right? And ultimately, people had to rely, marketers like us had to rely on last click for a long time because there were no other strong alternates.

[00:16:58] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:16:58] Sid: Right? But in the last eighteen months or so, it's fascinating that the third-party measurement systems, so systems that are run by not platforms like us, but independent players, have done an incredible amount of innovation in the space. So I'm talking like partners like Fospha or Northbeam or Triple Whale or Measured or Haus. I'm pretty sure I'm missing like a dozen at this point. What these platforms are able to tell us is they're finally able to completely map your customer's journey. And as a small business owner, it's imperative for you to understand where your customer came from. If you just go on last click, what we also see in six to twelve months later, your growth starts to stifle off and you can't answer the question what's happening because you've basically been channeling everything in the last click and not realizing where your consumers were actually coming in from, right? So in that Hot Wheels story, if I was the Hot Wheels growth manager and I just used last-click jail, where would I put all the money? I would put all the money in that last promo offer on the add to cart.

[00:18:07] Phillip: Mhmm. That's

[00:18:07] Sid: Right. Yeah.

[00:18:08] Phillip: Right? Because that's the thing that got it to tip over when you were watching for the promo, right?

[00:18:14] Sid: But not realizing that my daughter already had made the decision to buy one of the two products, and that decision wasn't in that marketplace. That decision was happening in chat with friends. That decision was happening in watching creator videos. If I were the Hot Wheels growth manager and I did just that, I would stave off the growth that I would have gotten from this new customer who could have come into my portfolio, right? Ultimately, it is to stop letting the last click be the sole judge and ask your marketing team, even if that's just you, hey, was my last $10,000 incremental of spend? Was my last $100,000 of spend incremental? Many brands are not asking that question today. I myself was guilty of that, by the way, just a few years ago, and I found that over about 10% of my spend, the last 10% of the spend, wasn't generating incremental return. And that's where I would want small and medium businesses to pay more attention, especially in an economy like today, especially in the world global order situation right now. It's even more imperative for your dollars to go longer and harder. If that answer tends to be Snapchat, great. I'm here to help them. But the answer may not be Snapchat, and that's okay too. But I just want their dollars to work harder for them, just as hard as they're working for it.

[00:19:36] Brian: Yeah. I think it's so important. Something that you hit on earlier is a word I wanna bring back, which is some sort of multiplayer. Maybe Phillip said that. I think that the activity you just talked about for how marketers can sort of get to that point of decision, closer to that point of decision, is through that authentic engagement you talked about. So handing over the brand in many ways to the community and, like, giving them and empowering them with, and being in real relationship with them. And in many ways, like, I always like to say, like, working with influencers and community is closer to almost B2B commerce than B2C commerce. And there's a lot of cues to take from there, because B2B has done a really good job over the, you know, building real relationship, engaging with people where they're at, finding the things that they care about, and the process of selling to them. And, like, I think that this means taking a different approach, especially on a platform like Snap where the medium itself sort of dictates a little bit more of like a lo-fi approach on Snap rather than a really polished approach. And so that's, you know, that's still even today counterintuitive for a lot of marketers. They wanna make sure that things are, like, really polished and have high production value. But how can brands really recalibrate and sort of, you know, rethink their creative instincts for a conversation that's native to the Snap environment?

[00:21:12] Sid: Yeah. It's so great that you asked me that question, Brian, and I think you made something boring, something very exciting, for the very reason that it works. And I think there's a lot of nugget there. A lot of B2C marketers, especially commerce marketers, should take their cue from B2B right now. And there are sort of three things going on under that question. One, generally speaking, we need to think about not only where the consumers are spending time. Right? I said Snapchat is where a lot of time gets spent and these people then don't end up spending time elsewhere. But more importantly, how are they spending their time? So really taking out your consumer research lens for a second, just talk to ten, twenty, 100 of your consumers, and what you will realize is that they're not spending the time as you may be.

[00:22:10] Brian: And

[00:22:12] Sid: Example could be they're spending a lot of time sending visual snaps to each other. They're spending time in chat. They're not always just scrolling short-form video. And have you, as a brand, shown up in chat? Most brands today may not answer that question as a heck yes, we have. Now, it's scary. I get that. It's a new mode. It's a new conversation space. It's extremely private, too. The good news is that consumers are open to it. In fact, nine out of 10 US users, as Teddy has pointed out, are open to receiving messages from brands in chat apps like Snapchat, and we're seeing the same thing ourselves. About half of Snapchatters are more likely to purchase products when they see creators show up in their chat, which takes me to my second point. Not only where are they spending time and how are they spending time, who are they listening to? That's where finding, just even finding five or 10 creators on a lot of aggregator platforms that you can just open up your desktop and your phone on to start trialing your product. Yeah. That's such an important moment for your new consumers, because what many brands are thinking, hey, that's my new customer. How do I do the hard sell? What they're not thinking about is the exact opposite. For that consumer, you may be their first brand in that product category. So you need the B2B muscle there. You need to tell them about the product, the promise, the benefit there, and it even answers some hard questions around values, sustainability, things that appeal to consumers these days that are very important in their decision making. They may not overtly state that in a search query. Right?

[00:24:02] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:24:03] Sid: And then the last piece that's incredibly important is apply the right measurement strategy to see how your dollars are performing. Again, going back to that last-click jail. Look at any one of the third-party providers that I mentioned. There are easy plans to get started on. Find out your entire consumer journey before you figure out which channels to invest in and what kind of ads to run. You should do all of these three things before you run your fourth dollar. Don't be in a race to put your credit card and spend your first $10,000. Try to put these three pieces out first, because when you do so, those $10,000 or $100,000 or whatever else will go a long way further.

[00:24:44] Phillip: There's, you were talking about this parallel between B2B, and I know you were recently at a B2B conference, Brian, so there might be B2B on the brain. One of the stark contrasts, though, is that today in consumer, I don't think that there's a tremendous amount of organic to be had. It's a lot of paid media. Like, people's entire business runs on paid media. I do wanna talk about Sponsored Snaps, but I do think that that's the whole game. And we were talking about channel mix earlier, right? And I think that when you're talking about the way that people are running cross-channel campaigns, and Sponsored Snaps certainly comes into that. Consumers are open to brand messages and chat. How do Sponsored Snaps translate into that openness, into measuring incremental conversions? And I guess what KPI and window, I guess, is part of that question. But what's the simplest way to integrate Snaps and Sponsored Snaps into a cross-channel campaign, and how do you measure it? Because I think we were just talking about last click. That's the default. So let's kinda tie that whole conversation back together, Sid.

[00:25:56] Sid: Yeah. Look. Sponsored Snaps are bringing brands right into a chat feed. So it's opening up a part of a service that we've never opened earlier. And a lot of brands don't realize the power of that. The in-audience is extremely significant. Right? It's right where their inner friends and family are, so you get an opportunity to actually converse with them in that very private space. Now, how to make advantage of that as a business? First of all, it's actually fairly easy to make sure your ads can just show up on Sponsored Snaps. It's literally clicking a button or letting that button remain clicked for the most part. Next, you should think about making sure that your message isn't a hard sell. Your message shows up as a conversation. I was talking about searching for answers, so you must figure out what the question in the top of the funnel sort of consideration space for the consumer may be that you can answer with Sponsored Snap. Third, after that is done, just start testing a few creative ideas. This is such a new space. Our consumers are loving it, but we also see brands innovate at this space, like literally a five-second video with just a conversational style question about a new movie launch or a new product drop or a promo that's coming up is creating a lot of engagement. And when that happens, what we're seeing is Sponsored Snaps in auction and in action on our platform is generating more conversions, more incremental audience for the brands.

[00:27:41] Sid: We are not stopping here, though. Brands have already asked us, well, what's next? Where are you guys taking this? Because ultimately, this can lead to back-and-forth conversation, and it should. So just last week, we announced AI Sponsored Snaps, the next evolution of a product where now brands can not only just show up in chat feed, they can actually integrate their own AI agents into the chat for more personalized one-on-one conversation, right? And that's the true essence of a chat space. It's not just a message, it's a conversation. It needs some back and forth, and so that's where we're headed next. We're so early in this journey right now that talk to me in six months, would be telling you five more things you've done at that point in time, because both our consumers, our brands are learning this behavior at the same time, and it's fascinating to see how deeply engaged both sets of audiences are. You talked about measurement. Really, you don't need to do anything different for measuring it. So whatever your measurement stack is, Sponsored Snaps, because they're part of the auction, they will show up in your measurement, right? And so we don't want businesses to do hard work, new work, to do ads on Sponsored Snap beyond thinking about their consumer's mindset and the message fidelity.

[00:29:02] Brian: Yeah. I feel, I was gonna ask this. It started to pop into my mind, but, like, it seems like, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to personalize. When you get into a conversation, you want it to be personal. Right? When you're chatting with someone, you're often thinking about it like a personal relationship or conversation. And that other side of that chat has some sort of context to who you are. And I mean, you probably don't have data on this yet, but I am curious, and we will have to do a look back here. We'll have you back on the show in six months from now. But how personalized do people want things to get from a brand? Do they want it to feel like, hey, Brian Lang. Like, what's up? You know, how are your kids? Like, how are things coming with the Hot Wheels car you bought? You know, like, how far down that road of, like, a personality or a relationship type engagement do they want it to be? Or do they just wanna see things that are relevant to them and not feel like it's a relationship? And that's an open question.

[00:30:14] Sid: Yeah. Look, I think this is early. Right? And the consumer behavior on conversational commerce is still far from being set. And I've been in this industry, as you both have been, for a long time. There is that fine divide between being relevant and being intrusive.

[00:30:33] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:30:33] Sid: Right? For every brand, for every category, the mark on that spectrum is different, right? Which you may consider, Brian, to be intrusive in that category may not be what I consider intrusive.

[00:30:46] Brian: Right. Exactly. Got

[00:30:47] Sid: To let the consumer guide you in that, right? And that's actually behind every product that we're building. We're letting consumers guide us on what's okay and what's not while creating very high privacy standards by definition, so we're not slapping this on, band-aiding this on our platform. Now, in terms of data, what we're seeing, when ads are in chat, they're extremely attentive. There's a high personal intent. It's a full-screen media that grabs attention immediately and users have a lot of control over that interaction. When that happens, we see more than 2x higher unaided brand awareness. We see almost 2x higher purchase intent than other platforms when users fully engage with the Sponsored Snap. These are incredible results. Right? It's not 10% higher. This is orders of magnitude higher, and this translates into business results across the funnel. And so a travel company called Contiki leveraged Sponsored Snaps early on to increase their return on ad spend and reduce their cost per purchase. They got, I think, some, I want to say this right, but like more than 280% higher return on ad spend. Like, we had to double-check the math on that thing. Is it really? We had to ask the customer, is that really right? And it turned out to be right.

[00:32:13] Sid: The reason for that was because this is such a new medium with incremental audience, with incremental consumer behavior, that brands can't afford to sleep on it. This is kind of like, I don't know if you remember, like, a decade ago, that vertical video thing. Mhmm. Was this huge. Maybe. Yeah. Right. But Snapchat innovated it, right, like the vertical video. And I remember those conversations, I was back then not at Snapchat, but I remember these conversations in YouTube videos floating around called the vertical video syndrome. You know what? People will not look at phones like this. They will look at phones like this, right? And guess what happened? No, they didn't change like this. They actually just kept looking at things like this, right? And brands that were late to catch on to that consumer behavior had to do a lot of catch-up. And what I'm worried about is brands are again sleeping on this next shift, which is being accelerated by AI. Now in minute 30, we'll talk about AI for a second, but AI is naturally endemic to chat, right? People are usually over the-

[00:33:23] Phillip: That's true.

[00:33:24] Sid: Chatting with AI agents. At that point in time, you need to be the answer to a question. You can't have your technical marketing funnel from other platforms extend one to one here, and that consumer behavior is changing even more rapidly than the vertical video consumption did. And so that is where I think we want to help brands get onto that journey very quickly, but it's also incumbent upon brands to figure that out.

[00:33:52] Phillip: There's some real outcomes too. I feel like when, you know, maybe not everybody like Contiki can have 280% ROAS. But in a world where we're all combined, we're bragging on Twitter about one and a half, 1.5x ROAS. I feel like anything can improve in that world. Because I remember, there's just a totally different game on the field now, especially when we're talking about this intersection now between what is AI, what is chat, what is social media, and where is advertising going into the AI LLM space. And it sounds like Snap has figured out something there that already exists, that maybe advertisers have some early alpha into, that you don't have to wait around for other answer engines to figure out when you already have a built-in audience. It sounds, that's super interesting to me. I don't think enough people are talking about it. Sid, it's been great having you on. There's a couple, there's at least one more thing I just wanted to talk about real quick, and that is you cover SMB, right? It's part of your portfolio. So I think a lot of folks in that area of the market are probably thinking about, well, how do I get started? What's the level of creative? How polished does the creative have to be? How does that perform? What performs best? Can you give some folks a little bit of a sense of what is working right now on Snapchat? And do you have any good sense of advice for folks that are looking to potentially pilot creative on the platform?

[00:35:49] Sid: Yeah. Thank you for that question, Phillip. I think generally businesses I speak to, even my friends sometimes, they consider Snapchat as, oh, there is this platform that you have to do lots of polished, high-quality lenses or augmented reality on. Yeah. Sure, you can win with that too, but you know what? A bulk of our advertising is not that. A small business can really just start with a couple of images, their own third-party e-commerce stores, or wherever they have hosted their website, like a Shopify store as an example. There are hundreds such integrations that we as a platform have done with platforms that you may be using for your CRM, for your payment systems, for your commerce platforms, for your measurement systems, so you really don't need to do anything except click maybe one or two buttons in those platforms. That's number one because we don't want to make it hard for you. You, as it is, don't have time figuring out what's happening around in the world, figuring out where your next vendor order has to come through, figuring out where your next sort of CRM innovation needs to come through and so on. You shouldn't be worrying about a platform. The third thing you need to do is, after you've basically just figured out your one or two creatives, figured out what buttons to click in your own platform, is to give the advertising about four to six weeks, because with every new platform, the platform is learning your business as much as your business is learning the same platform.

[00:37:17] Sid: What I see a business owner make a mistake is take a decision, usually based on some last-click methodology, in the first ten to fifteen days, and you're often going to lose out on what is truly incremental because you didn't let this thing survive. So if you pick a new platform, I don't care if it's Snap or if it's some other platform, but if you pick a new platform, stick with it for about four to six weeks. Follow that platform's recommendations because, trust me, that platform has learned recommendations about thousands of businesses like yours and can do more smart campaigns for yourself rather than you trying to second guess the platform. And so just this last year, we've been making an innovation on Smart Campaign Suite where businesses can literally just tell us what their budgets are, tell us what their creatives are, tell us who their targeting is, and we can go find you the next best conversion. Right? I ran a small business and I was one of the outliers where I love marketing. Most small and mid-sized businesses love their product. That's their passion area. Marketing is what they have to do to win in the market. Let the platforms do it for you.

[00:38:34] Phillip: Yeah. What a great place to be. And I think too, for anyone who's, you know, not thinking about or has a misconception about what Snap is today, this has been a great place to reframe that conversation. You kinda took it from me, Sid. In the pre-show, I was telling you I have a study group of two, a little focus group in my house, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old, and they have a whole gaggle of friends, hundreds of friends in school and a couple dozen cousins that all are, it's the only platform they use. It guides every decision they make, every purchase decision they make. I know that you guys have solved that demographic. To me, it's really interesting and enlightening to know how many people grow up with the platform and how many people are still using it every day and every week. I think that's really powerful for our audience to know and understand. Where are you gonna be next? How can people go and find out more about Sponsored Snaps and what's next for Snapchat?

[00:39:42] Sid: Yeah. Easy. Just type in forbusiness.snapchat.com. That's where we post all the good stuff that comes out the moment we can, and right there you can also ask for support and help. We're one of the few platforms in the industry who will take a phone call and who will hand-guide you to run ads properly. And then ultimately, it's about finding success for you. So we won't just want your ads to be set up. We want your business to grow. And that is the only piece that keeps me up every single day working here, because that's literally the joy of doing this job, is finding customers like Comfrt find that success, customers like Contiki find that success, customers like Crocs, who was your last guest, like find that success, because that's the true nature of it. I will say one thing more. I was asked this question. Hey, you have a young demographic. What about the older demographic?

[00:40:40] Phillip: One in four are 35 years old or older. I think that that just, that's that proof point.

[00:40:45] Sid: Again, not many people realize that. And the brands who win at Snapchat call this the best kept secret for Snapchat. And I hope we're doing some myth testing through this.

[00:40:57] Phillip: We, you know, we had talked about this a lot. I spent many years in strategy, Sid, and I'd stand in the room with board members of startups and they'd talk about how they need to go through, we've done the persona exercise before, and we know our persona, and it was always a pet food brand. It's like, well, it's Gloria and she has two kids and they're ages six and seven and their dog is a golden retriever. I'm like, yeah, well, you formed the brand fifteen years ago and the personas were done fifteen years ago and the dog is dead and the kids are in college now. But people grow up. Yeah. People grow up. Very rarely do those people stick around with brands and platforms. And it seems to me like Snap is one of the few where people have stuck around, and that's such an interesting and powerful thing to be able to speak to, especially to the retail audience about the opportunity that's ahead.

[00:42:05] Sid: It's a fascinating nugget, Phillip, if only more businesses did what you just asked them to do. Yeah. But thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

[00:42:12] Phillip: Great to have you on. Thank you, Sid, and thank you all so much for listening. Go check it out and see what they're doing. I think it's really powerful. And thank you so much for checking out this episode of Future Commerce. Like, follow, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Helps more people join the conversation. If you wanna bring more Future Commerce into your world, check out our print shop, futurecommerce.com. Remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We will see you next time.