Snap Announces New Ad Offering Ahead of Holiday Season

The holiday shopping journey is changing – and Snap wants to make sure it’s part of that journey. 

The company has announced the launch of the Commerce Power Pack – a series of performance updates that have been designed to help advertisers prepare for the upcoming shopping season, with a focus on turning product discovery into action and optimising for the things that matter most to advertisers. 

This includes Dynamic Product Ads, which use AI-powered recommendation models to help advertisers surface products to the right Snapchat users, based on conversion signals – with the company finding in a controlled study that Dynamic Product Ads campaigns for Pixel Purchase were able to deliver a 22% improvement in 7-day Cost Per Action (CPA).

Research from TransUnion has also found that Snapchat can drive a half-day faster time to conversion than other leading social platforms, and that Snapchat delivered the highest indexed return on ad spend (ROAS) of all 12 media channels in commerce. 

“The holidays are the most competitive stretch of the year, and every dollar has to maximise returns,” says Sid Malhotra, VP of SMC at Snap. “Snapchat gives businesses a faster path from discovery to action, and the Commerce Power Pack builds on that advantage with smarter optimisation and higher-value outcomes. 

“Last Black Friday / Cyber Monday, Northbeam clients cut the cost of winning a new customer by 20% on Snapchat, while every other major platform got more expensive. That’s what spending smarter on Snapchat looks like.”

Changes to holiday shopping

According to Snapchat, today’s consumers are moving more fluidly between conversation, inspiration and purchase – meaning that it is crucial for marketing teams to make sure that advertising campaigns are meeting consumers where they are to make sure the buyer journey is as seamless as possible. 

And this journey is starting faster than ever. 

Research from Attentive has found that 46% of shoppers begin their holiday shopping before November, despite traditional expectations assuming that the majority of holiday shoppers begin making purchases during the Black Friday period. 

“Brands are used to treating Black Friday as the starting line for holiday marketing. This year, it will be the continuation of months of customer engagement,” says Jema Birkmeyer, Vice President of Strategic Sales at Attentive. “Consumers are discovering products, comparing options and deciding which brands they trust long before the holiday rush.”

Advertising innovations at Snap

This expanded offering from Snap follows the news that Ronan Harris has been named the Chief Commercial Officer of Snap, to lead the company’s global advertising sales and go-to-market organisation, with a focus on driving advertising revenue growth and strengthening advertiser and agency partnerships. 

“Ronan brings deep advertising expertise, strong relationships with our partners, and a sustained record of growth at Snap,” said Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap. “I look forward to working with him in this new role as we help more advertisers succeed on Snapchat and grow our advertising business.”

Snapchat has already announced a series of advertising innovations as of late, such as the Snap Smart Assistant – which allows advertisers to describe their goals and automatically recommend campaign objectives and optimisation settings – and a Model Context Protocol Server, to make it easier for advertisers and partners to connect Snapchat to existing AI tools. 

Who are Snap’s key partners?

• Google Cloud: Google Cloud has announced a partnership with Snap involving the company using Google's data, analytics and AI/ML technologies to power growth for Snapchat. Built on a more than ten-year partnership, Snap expands its use of Google Cloud to transform the customer experience and deliver more personalised solutions.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): Snap rebuilt its cloud architecture for Snapchat using AWS services to handle more than 5 billion snaps per day. Snap leveraged AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), ElastiCache, CloudFront, S3, and DynamoDB to create a low-latency, real-time messaging system capable of processing 10 million transactions per second. 
• Perplexity: In 2025, Snap and Perplexity announced a partnership to integrate Perplexity’s AI-powered answer engine directly into Snapchat, giving Snapchat’s community of nearly 1 billion monthly active users a new way to ask questions, explore topics they care about, and learn about the world.
• Qualcomm: In April 2026, Specs, a subsidiary of Snap, announced a multi-year strategic agreement with Qualcomm to power future generations of Specs with Qualcomm Technologies’ industry-leading Snapdragon system-on-a-chip. This marked the first flagship engagement for Specs.