Snapchat Grows Up: How Brands are Using the Billion-User Powerhouse

If you still think Snapchat is just for teenagers, Sidharth Malhotra wants to change your mind. Malhotra, Global VP of SMB and Mid-Market at Snap Inc.

, recently appeared on the Retail Remix podcast to discuss why Snapchat has become a serious performance marketing channel for small- and mid-sized brands — and why the platform’s nearly billion-user community represents an opportunity many advertisers are overlooking.

A Platform That Has Grown Up The most persistent misconception Malhotra encounters from brands is that Snapchat’s audience skews too young to be commercially relevant. “That’s really the biggest misconception that brands keep asking me about,” Malhotra said. “Our community is literally growing up with us right now.

And this generation now has $5 trillion in spending power.” The math supports his case. Snapchat has nearly one billion monthly active users, and daily active users have nearly doubled since the start of the pandemic.

Someone who joined the platform 10 years ago as a college student is now in their early-to-mid-30s — buying homes, starting families and making significant purchasing decisions. That demographic shift has direct implications for brands chasing new customers. According to Snap’s internal research, 40% of daily U. S.

Snapchatters between the ages of 16 and 64 are not on TikTok on any given day. 80% are not on Pinterest. “What that means is that brands can reach people on our service that they are not reaching elsewhere,” Malhotra said. “And that is significant.” Active Engagement vs.

Passive Scrolling Beyond audience size, Malhotra points to the nature of engagement on Snapchat as a key differentiator. Because Snapchat is fundamentally a communication platform — “chat is in our name,” he noted — users interact with it differently than they do with content-feed-based services.

“Snapchat is a service that rolls all these utilities into one,” he said, referencing its chat, feed and maps features. The result, he argues, is what he calls “two-thumb” engagement — users actively participating rather than passively scrolling. That level of attention has translated into measurable results for brands.

Comfort, the apparel brand known for its viral airplane hoodie, used Snapchat to drive a 32% increase in revenue on the platform.

AR as a ‘Pocket Fitting Room’ Snapchat’s augmented reality capabilities have long been a signature feature of the platform, and Malhotra sees them as a meaningful tool for brands of all sizes — not just large ones with big production budgets. “I think of AR as a pocket fitting room,” he said.

“If you’re a brand today and you’re selling a product that people can feel and touch, your two most viable options are to put it on a physical shelf in a big box retail store or to put it as a tile on a website. AR crushes both of them and merges it.” He illustrated the point with an example from his own family.

His mother-in-law, a retired school teacher who started a small business exporting Indian-made footwear, used Snap’s AR try-on capability to show consumers how her shoes would look — without the shelf space or marketing budget a larger brand would require. “She said something so poignant to me that has stuck with me,” Malhotra recalled.

“She said, ‘All that’s left now is for people to feel how comfortable my shoes are.'” He noted that 350 million people use AR daily on Snapchat, and that the underlying technology is AI — something Snap has been developing for a decade, well before AI became a mainstream topic in the industry. Not every brand needs to start with AR, however.

Hibbett, the sporting goods retailer, achieved a 31% increase in revenue using Snap’s dynamic product ads, which use pixel-based personalization to serve ads to the right customers at the right time.

The ‘Hot Wheels Problem’ and the Limits of Last-Click Attribution One of the more vivid illustrations Malhotra offers of a broader challenge in digital marketing involves his daughter and a birthday gift. About a year ago, his then-8-year-old daughter decided to pick out a Hot Wheels gift for her younger brother.

She watched videos from creators he liked, browsed marketplaces, saved items to a cart and waited for a price drop before completing the purchase. “That’s a pretty normal buying journey,” Malhotra said. “We look at something we like, we research it, we find it and we take a few moments and then we buy it.” The question he poses: who gets the credit?

“Did the show that inspired my son to watch Hot Wheels get the credit? Did the search engine query that my daughter did on my phone, did the ad she got in that young creator video? Or was it the marketplace that got that last click?”

Malhotra argues that relying on last-click attribution — a practice he describes as being like “trying to understand a movie by only watching the final scene” — gives brands a fundamentally incomplete picture of how customers actually make purchasing decisions. “The buying journey is a relay race, it’s not a sprin