The social media giant aims to use this technology to build more engaging user experiences and more personalized advertising models.
Snapchat's parent company Snap Inc. plans to increase investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Bloomberg reported Sunday. In an interview with Bloomberg published Monday, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the company is “laggarding the machine learning front,” and that it's “reflected in our results.” Ta.
The new investment is reportedly aimed in part at building a more dynamic and enjoyable user experience, including creating augmented reality (AR) filters and delivering more personalized content to users. That's what it means.
It also aims to create more personalized marketing campaigns for brands that advertise on Snapchat, “ensuring the right ads are shown to the right people at the right time,” Snap says. Patrick Harris, President of Americas, said: drum. “We invest with the goal of improving performance for our partners while targeting advertising in a privacy-friendly and efficient manner.”
Harris said Snap will invest $0.83 to $0.85 per daily active user every quarter through the remainder of 2024 across its infrastructure, including AI and ML capabilities. From the second quarter to the end of the fourth quarter he will have more than $1.62 billion.
News of the investment comes after a multi-year process within Snap aimed at overhauling its advertising business. This process was spurred by a variety of pressures on the broader technology and marketing industries in 2022, including economic pressures from the pandemic and Apple's privacy policy changes that disrupt user-level tracking on mobile devices.
During that time, “Snapchat has been primarily focused on improving its lower-funnel ad offerings and measurement capabilities for advertisers,” according to Minda Smiley, senior social media analyst at market research firm eMarketer.
The change has cost Snap both time and money, but it's starting to pay off.
The number of small and medium-sized brands advertising on Snapchat jumped 85% year over year, according to the brand's latest earnings report, released last month. Snap also reported its first double-digit revenue increase in more than six fiscal quarters.
“Snapchat's advertising business is finally recovering after a tough few quarters, thanks in part to the company's focus on direct-response advertising, which has been well received by marketers,” Smiley said. he says. “With the advertising platform under control, it is no surprise that the company is focused on how to further expand its AI products and investments.”
Still, as Smiley points out, “In terms of ad revenue, Snap is a relatively small player compared to other social media platforms.” It estimates that it will earn $70 million, while TikTok will make $10.42 billion and Meta will make $64.63 billion.
Snap is increasingly focused on leveraging emerging technologies to enable advertisers to connect with the platform's largely young user base in new ways.
For example, earlier this year Snapchat launched sponsored AR filters. This is a feature that allows brands to embed marketing content directly onto a user's screen through their phone's camera.
The company began focusing more on AI in early 2023 following the initial huge success of ChatGPT. Last February, the company debuted My AI, a chatbot available through Snapchat+, the app's subscription-only tier, based on OpenAI's GPT-3 large-scale language model.
The company has been investing in AR for an even longer period of time. In 2021, it released Spectacles, glasses designed to superimpose virtual elements onto the real world. (Meta was at the same time pouring vast amounts of talent and capital into the Metaverse, but it has since begun to put more emphasis on AI and wearable AR technology, with Ray Ban Smart Glasses released in September getting a multimodal AI upgrade last month. )
Unlike other big tech companies that are busy building their own AI technology (including Meta), Snap will partner with industry leaders like Amazon and Google to develop its technology, Bloomberg reports.
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