• by Colin Kirkland , 4 hours ago

Ahead of the Cannes Lions Festival, Snapchat has announced a suite of AI-powered updates across its advertising stack, focusing on campaign setup, creative development, shopping, creator partnerships, and conversational experiences between brands and the app's 950 million monthly active users.

Snap is launching its own “Snap Smart Assistant” for advertisers.

Like Meta and Pinterest, which both introduced AI brand assistants to their social platforms in the past year, Snap’s feature is designed to recommend campaign objectives, audience strategy, optimization settings, and more.

Like Pinterest, which announced a platform-specific model context protocol (MCP) earlier this week, Snap is opening its ads platform to third-party AI agents via its own MCP server. The idea is that advertisers and Snap partners will be able to connect their preferred third-party campaign tools to Snapchat’s ad platform.

Snap's announcement states that the company is continuing to invest in its chatbot-based ad format in order to further the precision of conversational-based shopping. The company's AI Sponsored Snaps feature invites consumers to communicate directly with a brand within the app's chat feature.

The company is also in the process of revamping its Dynamic Product Ads feature with a new class of agentic recommendation models focused on synthesizing user behavior, real-time user intent, and other signals to surface the most relevant products during a user’s in-app experience.

Furthermore, Snap is also using AI to power advertisers’ creative assets. By uploading a single product image, Snap’s AI systems deliver multiple vertical, mobile-native formats.

New creative tools are built to enhance assets for full-screen vertical viewing, turn images into short-form video, and transform the background of a product image. Advertisers can select which AI tools they want to access in Ads Manager and choose between AI-generated assets.

Finally, similar to a recent announcement from LinkedIn, Snap is launching a new creator marketplace later this year.

The “Snap Creator Network” will allow advertisers to describe the creators they’re looking for via audience, tone, category, and campaign goals. Snap’s AI-powered system will then help match them with relevant creators.

“There’s a lot of conversation about AI transforming advertising, but the real opportunity is making advertising more useful,” says Ajit Mohan, Snap's Chief Business Officer, adding that Snap is attempting to build AI tools “around the ways people already communicate, discover, shop, and create” on the app.