How does Snapchat Drive Global Social New Marketing with AI+AR? | AI Competitive Interview

【Ebrun Original】In the wave of fierce competition for the AI high ground among global social platforms, Snapchat, a platform that uses the camera as its core interactive entry point, has built an innovative ecosystem covering over 900 million monthly active users with its unique "visual communication + augmented reality" genes. As a new marketing base for Chinese companies going global, Snapchat is also restructuring the advertising chain through AI technology.

For example, in creative production, Snapchat uses Gen AI technology to create a copy generator that, with just a piece of initial copy, allows brands to quickly get multiple attractive and culturally appropriate texts that greatly help Chinese companies going global improve the efficiency and quality of their advertising materials.

In terms of AR try-on functionality, Snapchat continuously simplifies the process of creating AR materials, helping brands directly convert 2D product catalogs into virtual trial experiences. Additionally, with the support of ML facial effects technology, brands can use Gen AI technology to independently create special effects lenses, shortening the creative cycle for AR filters and improving production efficiency.

In March of this year, Snapchat also launched the first batch of AI video filters based on its self-developed generation model. Users can interactively experience 90s hairstyles, transform into Western cowboys, try on the latest fashion, and explore various creative scenes through Sponsored AI Lenses. This allows users to express themselves while sharing their favorite products with friends. Through AI templates, Sponsored AI Lenses significantly shorten the content production cycle, eliminating the need for the previous 3D modeling and visual effects design steps, while enhancing brand storytelling and user engagement with unique visual effects.

It is reported that Snapchat has always attached great importance to the frontier development and application of AI technology and has continuously increased its investment in the field of AI in recent years. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the company's adjusted revenue reached $669 million, an increase of 9% from the same period last year. This growth is mainly attributed to the significant increase in infrastructure costs, especially in the areas of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Under the theme of "What AI Competitiveness do Global New Brands Need", Ebrun Power invited numerous cross-border service companies to conduct a series of interviews to share how they apply AI technology to enhance the level of service for companies going global and help them improve their overall competitiveness. Below is the content of the interview between Ebrun Power and the person in charge of Snap's international marketing.

Ebrun Power: Please introduce your company and its main business.

Answer: Snapchat is a visual communication app that helps users enhance their connections with friends, family, and the world. Its users are mainly concentrated in core regions such as the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and India, which highly overlap with the core markets for Chinese companies going global. Snapchat currently has over 900 million monthly active users and 460 million daily active users.

In China, Snap’s business mainly focuses on international marketing and AR-related software and hardware development. Thanks to the broad market opportunities in China, Snap's strategic layout in China continues to deepen, and it has successfully helped thousands of Chinese companies expand their overseas business. This includes e-commerce, gaming, entertainment, short videos, AIGC, and other verticals, making it a new marketing base for Chinese companies going global.

Snap has offices in Beijing and Shenzhen, with teams covering international marketing, camera business development, and various functional teams. Among them, the international marketing team covers sales, advertising products, data science, advertising creativity, and marketing communication, providing rare localized support and comprehensive services without time zone or language barriers for companies going global.

Ebrun Power: What are your products and their core application scenarios? How do they help global brands/companies going global enhance their competitiveness?

Answer: Snapchat has a rich and unique customized full-lifecycle, full-funnel marketing solution for different industries such as gaming, e-commerce, entertainment, short video, and more, addressing the diverse needs of overseas advertisers. For brand localization, Snapchat helps customize creativity to showcase unique products, convey unique selling points, and build brand awareness to increase consumer purchase intent. For growing brands, Snapchat fully showcases "hot tags" to drive user exploration of multiple products and initiate final orders through interaction. For mature brands, Snapchat helps guide users through product browsing and pricing, maintain customer stickiness through virtual try-ons, accelerate purchase decisions, strengthen brand connections, and drive repeat purchases from loyal customers.

Faced with intensified competition in overseas markets and rising costs, Snapchat continues to innovate its advertising products to inspire user buying behavior, deepen user awareness and favorability towards brands, and help overseas advertisers achieve both sales growth and long-term brand strength, standing out in the fiercely competitive overseas market. For example, Snapchat recently launched the advertising product Sponsored Snaps, which delivers full vertical video ads accurately to users' chat interface, allowing users to decide whether to view them and interact directly with the brand after clicking. This creative advertising placement builds a communication bridge between the brand and the user, promotes interaction, and helps overseas brands enhance user goodwill.

Ebrun Power: How has the rapid development of large-scale models and generative AI technology brought changes/upgrades to your products?

Answer: With years of deep AI field cultivation, Snap has implemented AI technology across multiple product functions to enrich user experience. With the rapid development of large-scale models and generative AI technology, Snap attaches great importance to and continuously strengthens the application of AI technology in products and international marketing business, enhancing platform features and expanding diverse user interaction scenarios to promote user stickiness and unlock new social experiences. For example, in the platform's core function of chat communication, Snapchat users can have rich and interesting interactions with the intelligent chatbot My AI. In addition, Snapchat users can also experience novel visual experiences through AI-empowered AR filters, such as "Cosmic Lens" and the crying face filter, which has garnered broad user love and recognition for these AI-empowered product features.

For international marketing business, Snapchat continues to explore the use of AI to help advertisers improve the efficiency and quality of their advertising materials, optimize overall advertising effects. In the face of language barriers and cultural differences that brands often encounter when going global, Snap has created a copy generator using Gen AI technology. Advertisers can quickly get multiple attractive and culturally appropriate texts with just a piece of initial copy, greatly facilitating brand localization promotion in overseas markets.

In the field of machine learning and automation technology research, Snap continues to streamline the process of creating AR materials, greatly reducing the time it takes to create AR try-on materials on a large scale, helping brands directly convert 2D product catalogs into virtual trial experiences. With the support of ML facial effects technology, brands can use Gen AI technology to independently create special effects lenses, shortening the creative cycle for AR filters and improving production efficiency.

In March 2025, Snap launched the first batch of AI video filters based on its self-developed generative model. Recently, Snapchat has further applied AI technology in advertising marketing, launching a new immersive generative AI advertising product that offers advertisers novel and efficient advertising formats, deepening their interaction with users. Snapchat users can interactively experience 90s hairstyles, transform into Western cowboys, try on the latest fashion, and explore various creative scenes through Sponsored AI Lenses. This allows users to express themselves while sharing their favorite products with friends. Through AI templates, Sponsored AI Lenses significantly shorten the content production cycle, eliminating the need for the previous 3D modeling and visual effects design steps, while enhancing brand storytelling and user engagement with unique visual effects.

Ebrun Power: How did your technological and product advantages accumulate?Answer: From the perspective of the platform itself, Snapchat has been different from traditional social media platforms since its inception. Our original intention was to provide users with a new choice beyond traditional social media. Snapchat focuses on "friend-based social interaction," and its primary use case has always been messaging friends and family rather than endless scrolling through a news feed. The well-known feature of disappearing messages emphasizes privacy and authentic interaction. Snapchat's unique values and positioning have created its distinctive and high-quality user base, making it an important choice for many partners, customers, and creators.

From a technical perspective, Snap has always attached great importance to the cutting-edge development and application of AI technology, continuously increasing its investment in the AI field in recent years to strengthen our products and technology. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Snapchat's investment in AI showed strong and sustained growth. The adjusted revenue cost in the fourth quarter of 2024 reached 669 million US dollars, a 9% increase from the same period last year. This growth is mainly attributed to the rising infrastructure costs, especially the significant increase in investment in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) over the past year.

At the research and development level of AI, Snap also made significant breakthroughs in the fourth quarter of 2024. The team successfully developed an innovative AI model that has the ability to quickly generate high-resolution images on mobile devices, greatly enriching and expanding the user experience when using Snap.

In addition, Snap also launched Easy Lens, an AI-driven tool that simplifies AR creation. Users can create and customize lenses through text prompts, reducing the threshold for creating AR filters. Easy Lens began early testing in mid-December and has been used to create over 10,000 filters, with a cumulative exposure of over 2 billion times by the end of Q1 2025.

Ebrun: From your point in the industry, how effective is the application of AI technology and AI tools for global brands/export enterprises? What changes and challenges are involved in this process?

Answer: In our observation, the application of AI technology and tools has deeply penetrated multiple key aspects of international marketing, greatly enhancing efficiency.

In the past, producing high-quality advertising materials often required a large investment of manpower and funds. However, with the empowerment of AI technology and tools, export brands can not only significantly shorten the production cycle of advertising materials, but also balance creative quality, production efficiency, and user experience.

Taking the recently launched Sponsored AI Lenses on Snapchat as an example, this immersive advertising format has led to much longer user interaction compared to regular filters. It quickly attracted the favor of advertisers such as Uber, Tinder, and Coldplay. Uber’s "My Thanksgiving Atmosphere" AI lens provided users with a new way to celebrate the holiday, while Tinder’s "My 2025 Date Atmosphere" lens added a lot of fun for New Year's Eve. The British rock band Coldplay also used AI lenses to immerse their fans in the cosmic scenes of their latest album "Moon Music." During the launch of Sponsored AI Lenses by Uber and Tinder, the average user dwell time was higher than the platform average.

However, opportunities and challenges go hand in hand. The application of AI globally is showing diverse and complex development trends. In the future, the industry of international marketing will need to jointly face challenges such as technological and talent bottlenecks, data security risks, content accuracy, and computational cost pressures.

Ebrun: What are your observations on the application of AI in the field of global brand expansion/cross-border e-commerce? What trends do you foresee in the coming years?

Answer: Driven by the wave of digitalization, AI technology is rapidly reshaping the cross-border e-commerce industry. In the future, the application of AI technology in the process of global brand expansion, especially in the marketing field, will further deepen and expand across various aspects of the entire value chain, from marketing insights, market analysis, to material production and delivery efficiency.

Taking the production of advertising materials as an example, AI is currently widely used in the production of static content such as text and images, with a low threshold and stable quality, and has already been put into use in some aspects. With the development of multi-modal models such as video generation, AIGC will play a greater role in the creative and advertising material production of international marketing, assisting advertisers to generate higher-quality and more innovative solutions for brand marketing.

AI entering the commercial reality, with brands and cross-border e-commerce taking the lead, the "2025 Global New Brand AI Competitiveness Conference" is scheduled for June 6th in Hangzhou with the theme of "Evolutionary Choices," jointly hosted by Ebrun and Jiayu Capital. Stay tuned!