‘Snap is enabling businesses of all sizes to reach consumers at efficient costs’

Camera app Snapchat has been on a strong growth trajectory in India despite being a late entrant in the market. With 100 million+ users in India, Snap is looking to grow its ad revenue aggressively.

In December 2021, Snap appointed Gaurav Jain as Head of APAC Business Expansion. Jain and his team are responsible for driving revenue growth and partnering with most strategic brands, agencies, and sales partners to provide innovative solutions on behalf of Snap.

Jain spoke to e4m about Snapchat's growth in India and the plans going forward.

Excerpts:

What kind of growth has Snapchat witnessed in India in the last year or so?

India is a super important market for Snap and the investments in localising the app experience, forging local partnerships, and celebrating Indian cultural moments on Snapchat, are some of the things that have led us to reach a milestone of 100 million people using the app on a monthly basis. And by the way, this figure is for October 2021 and our numbers have been growing since then.

This growth has happened since we have demonstrated our core product value to the Indian community, while also ensuring that Snapchat feels like a 'Made for India' app. We have taken steps to ensure that our creative tools and our AR reflect the local culture. We have partnered with a lot of local content producers/creators. We are offering localised experiences to Indians that resonate with them culturally. So, every time there is a festival we have been out there celebrating it with our community. And I think that's where the love and affection for the app come from.

The business growth for us has been fantastic. In 2020, we announced that there has been a 70% increase in the number of advertisers who are using our platform. We have dialled up our efforts since the mid of 2021. We have two official resellers in India who have a large footprint in the country. We are reaching out to advertisers of all sizes across verticals like e-commerce, gaming, CPG, and M&E. So, I think business has been good not only due to our varied ad products, but also our measurement capabilities. We have been able to showcase Snap as a platform where businesses of all sizes can advertise and get their results across the funnel.

So Snap is no longer only about branding, or it is no longer only about an app install. We are very proud to say that no matter what your business objective is, we have been able to deliver results, enabling businesses of all sizes to reach their consumers at efficient costs. The kind of cutting-edge work we do on AR has been taken up very well by users as well as businesses.

Snap has inked sales partnerships with Tyroo and Httpool. What's the idea behind working with resellers?

Our investments in India have only been growing up significantly. I joined the Snap India team last year and I have a direct team of people who work with the top advertisers in the country. We are reaching out to them proactively and we are telling them about our reach and ad proposition. At the same time what we are doing is we are working with two world-class resellers - Httpool and Tyroo. Tyroo has been a reseller for about three years now in India and they have helped us onboard lots of advertisers across the funnel and sizes. Httpool is a more recent partnership and they will help us to increase our footprint. Partners enable us to reach out to businesses at a much faster pace and that's the reason we entered into a second reseller partnership in India in Q4 of 2021.

Evan Spiegel recently said that India has been a great success story for Snap. What do you think is driving Snap's growth in India?

Evan is very proud of the fact that the team here has been increasing its presence in the country, month on month, quarter on quarter, and year on year. Some of the factors that are driving our growth here are local presence and localising the app. So, for example, an early move was making Snapchat available in nine major Indian languages. Going hyperlocal, for example, we have partnered with several colleges and high schools to engage students who might be interested in our approach to AR. The other big factor has been the distribution tie-ups with the OEMs and telecom carriers, which are very strong. Like I said earlier, celebrating cultural moments with the AR, I think, is very India-specific and the scale at which it has been done is fantastic. Our local partner ecosystem has been very strong. We recently announced a slate of major local partnerships with platforms like Flipkart, Moj, and Zomato. This has helped us raise awareness about Snapchat and the app's usefulness to millions of Indians.

Considering the rapid adoption of Snapchat in India, how prominently does the platform figure in the digital media plans of advertisers?

I can't tell you the love and attention we have been getting from advertisers in the last six months. This is because of the following reasons. One, we reach a lot of Indian consumers which spans right from 18 to 24 age groups and 24 to 34 age groups. These are the segments that the advertisers want to engage. The other thing is that we've been able to deliver results across the funnel. We recently partnered with PepsiCo India for the launch of their new flat-cut chips called Lay's Wafer Style. They were marketing it as the thinnest chips from the house of Lay's. We entered into a partnership with them and the 'Paper Thin, Wafer Thin' chips were promoted through a special interactive AR lens. We are also working with a few gaming companies in India, and delivering them installs at an efficient cost. We have also collaborated with a lot of entertainment companies. We had AR experiences for the pre-launch buzz of filmmaker SS Rajamouli's movie RRR. Very recently, we worked with KGF-2 to introduce AR experiences to garner pre-launch buzz. In March 2022, we collaborated with Badshah for a Retropanda-themed AR lens.

What are your plans for the SMB segment that advertises heavily on Google and Facebook?

We fundamentally believe that Snap as an advertising platform is built for businesses of all sizes. Having said that, because we have started dialling up our monetisation efforts recently, we are focusing on the top tier and the mid-market segments. That's not to say that small businesses cannot advertise on our platform. That said, the ambitions for India are very big and I would not be surprised if in a couple of years, or even earlier, we are able to launch full-fledged self-serve ad platforms wherein a small coffee shop owner could easily advertise. I think one of the things that stands out is public profiles on Snap. What we are saying is Snap is a great place for users, but it can also be a digital home for SMBs and large businesses alike. And that has been taken up well globally, including in India. You will soon see a lot of large companies, medium-sized companies, putting up their public profiles, putting up content on their public profile so as to gather engagement with the users. That's also part of the plan.

As a platform, Snapchat is skewed towards the youth audience with the 13-34 age category comprising over 90% of your user base. How are you widening the user base?

While we certainly see strong engagement with the younger generation like Gen Z and millennials, it's not that Snapchat is just for this age group. The majority of our reach around the world is above 18 years of age. Overall, we have seen people across ages and demographics embrace the platform and use it to connect with their close friends and families. In India, specifically, we see Snapchatters engaging heavily with augmented reality and with our content too which makes sense given our localisation efforts. In fact, AR is almost going mainstream. One of our India-specific report that we commissioned states that AR adoption in India is growing and by 2025 about 40% of the Gen Z and Millennial population in India will be frequent AR users. This is not only AR for fun or puppy ears, but also as a utility for shopping online. For example, do I want to try on the shoes before buying them or do I want to see the furniture virtually fit in my room before actually buying it? Or do I want to celebrate Independence Day or Republic Day at a landmark using our landmarks or lens?

What kind of advertising assets do you have on offer for brands?

An advertiser can use Snapchat's full-screen immersive ads to actually engage with an audience in an impactful way. That format is tailored to every business goal and objectives such as driving awareness, sales, subscriptions, or downloads. This kind of ad format helps an advertiser engage with Snapchatter in a way that's conversational, non-intrusive, and feels very organic to the platform. Besides the Snap Ads and the Story Ads, Snapchat also offers Catalog Ads, which can fetch products from a catalog to dynamically serve the creative according to users' prior history. There is also a Collection Ads that showcases a series of products on a carousel. There are also Commercial Ads now, which are like 6-second non-skippable ads, and help in engaging with the audience to drive brand awareness. We also have a unique offering called Promote Local Place which helps Snapchatters to reach a store's location on Snap. We recently partnered with One Plus for the opening of their flagship store in Bengaluru.