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 sprint,” he said. “And if you only credit that last click, you’re ignoring the runners who ultimately won the race for you.”
His recommendation: partner with third-party measurement platforms such as Northbeam, Triple Whale and Rockerbox to build a more complete view of the customer journey. He noted that Fospha recently ranked Snapchat as the top channel for new customer acquisition on both a cost-per-acquisition and return-on-ad-spend basis — a finding he expects would surprise marketers who have been focused elsewhere.
AI and the SMB Advantage
Malhotra is direct about the advantage he believes AI gives smaller brands right now.
“A small brand with a very smart strategy can now truly out-execute a Goliath in a way that we’ve never seen in our lifetimes,” he said, describing an internal tagline at Snap: “AI plus Snapchat equals an awesome playing field.”
Where large corporations often struggle to adopt new technology quickly — held back by internal processes and legacy systems — small and mid-sized businesses can move fast. Malhotra described a business that would take a large corporation a full quarter to approve internally as something a smaller brand could test by the following Tuesday.
Snap has built this thinking into its product roadmap, rolling out smart campaign solutions and developing AI agents to help small businesses get started with advertising on the platform more easily.
Chat as the Next Frontier
Perhaps the most forward-looking part of the conversation centered on chat-based commerce — an area Malhotra sees as the next major frontier in performance marketing.
“Chat feed is the new frontier, in my opinion, because it’s where brands are moving from just being a logo on a screen to being a trusted participant in a conversation,” he said.
He cited data showing that 86% of social media users in the U.S. are open to receiving messages from brands on apps such as Snapchat. Snap recently launched its Sponsored Snaps ad product, and the company is already seeing conversions rise when brands use the chat feed placement.
For brands considering the format, Malhotra offered several practical guidelines:
- Keep content short and conversational — not a 15-second video spot, but bite-sized content suited to a one-on-one setting;
- Focus on immediate action, moving users to the next logical step in the journey rather than asking them to think multiple steps ahead; and
- Treat chat as personal, ephemeral and casual — distinct from how brands approach video content or feed advertising.
He acknowledged the format is still early-stage. “This journey is going to take a few years to ultimately build into this massive engine that we think it will be,” he said.
But for brands willing to experiment now, Malhotra sees a window of opportunity.
“It’s okay that my competitor is sleeping on Snap, is sleeping on chat, because it gives me the edge to be the first in this new era of communication,” he said, relaying what he hears from brand leaders who have already leaned in. “If they are sleeping on it, they’re doing it at a risk to their own brand success over a period of time.”
