Augmented Reality Helps to Differentiate Retail Media: Snap’s Kevin Longo

CANNES – Social-media companies in the past decade have built out their commerce platforms, helping brands to drive direct sales. As they collaborate with retailers that sell advertising, they are finding ways to complement each other’s strengths.

“For everything that retail media networks have, one thing they don’t have is consistency,” Kevin Longo, head of commerce at social-media company Snap, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Tameka Kee at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“We play a little bit something different for every partner,” he said. “Some people look at us on the simpler end of just really high reach, a unique audience and cheap CPMs. Then some people who have more sophisticated integrations.”

Source: Snap

Snap’s image-messaging app Snapchat pioneered consumer adoption of augmented reality, which overlays digital images on the real world as seen through a smartphone camera or wearable device. Snapchat’s face filters are a popular feature for driving engagement with the app and with brands that sponsor customized AR content.

“One thing that’s been really interesting is a lot of these guys are seeing our offering and augmented reality as a unique opportunity to differentiate their own platform,” Longo said. “As they think about unique audience, cheap CPMs, performant, but also we get this unicorn ad product of augmented reality.”

You’re watching coverage of Beet.TV’s Global Leadership Summit: Retail & Commerce Media, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2024, presented by CMX, Criteo, LiveRamp & Snap. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. To view all of Beet.TV’s Cannes Lions 2024 content, please visit this page.