India is a strategically important market for ad revenues: Snap India MD

I’ve been finding it very exciting. We crossed 200 million plus subscribers in India in 2023, and we effectively represent young India. Another interesting dimension is that our user base has very little overlap with other similar apps in the market. This means that almost 55 per cent of our users who use Snapchat daily don’t use Facebook and 15 per cent of daily Snapchatters don’t use Instagram. Our camera is the most used in the world, more than the Android camera or Apple camera. All of these factors make our app the destination to interact with augmented reality. 

Ten years ago, when TV was mainstream, I would describe the ad environment as TV plus digital, as digital was seen as an extension of TV. Things are the other way around in the present environment. The question now is how to make digital propositions engaging, not just a thirty-second property that is skippable. Advertisers care about this in an environment that is very cluttered at the moment. If you look at the digital ad environment today, it is very interruptive instead of being interactive. Snapchat has been offering this interactive ability to ads for a long time, allowing brands to create ad campaigns by setting up special filters on the app. What we are doing differently now is making all video assets AR (augmented reality) ready. This engagement will give dividends to brands once they start to adopt it. For example, across studies, we’ve proved that both in purchase intent and brand association, we are almost 2x higher than other social media platforms, with our AR proposition.

I think we want to bring education and awareness to creative agencies and brands first and foremost, because the mental model of most advertisers today is: I will just create video creatives that are optimised for reach and frequency on digital platforms. We want them to add AR advertising into this model as well. We also need to build awareness of the success of such advertising to demonstrate its quick business impact. And we have success stories: by using Snap, Ajio saw a 22x ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), Myntra saw a 4 per cent increase in action intent. To answer your question, our ambition over the next six months is to see all the top brands in India across e-commerce, CPG, consumer tech, and travel make this mainstream on Snapchat, similar to the way we saw the transition from TV to digital video advertising.

I think this is the most exciting time to be in India. I mean, we are fortunate to be going through what I call a transformation as far as the Internet or digital in India is concerned. You look at any metric: smartphone penetration, digital consumption metrics on video, digital payment metrics, and the adoption of 5G that’s bound to happen. I think we are the leaders in all digital adoption metrics around the globe. Our digital advertising market, which was roughly about $9 billion in 2023, will probably be $20 billion by 2029-2030, driven by growing video and growing commerce, right? India is already a third of Snap’s global community, so we consider it a very strategically important market.