Snapchat’s AI-powered conversational ads

Snap is adding AI power to its conversational ads in Snapchat.

TechCrunch explained, “‘AI Sponsored Snaps’ (…) will allow users to interact directly with brands’ AI agents. Sponsored Snaps are the ads placed directly into the app’s main Chat tab. Until now, users couldn’t interact with these ads, but with the launch of AI Sponsored Snaps, they’ll be able to do things like ask questions and get recommendations.”

Read more in TechCrunch. (April 28)

According to Snap — citing data from May 2025 (huh?) — AI Sponsored Snaps delivered “22% more conversions with nearly 20% lower cost per action, and 2x more conversions per full-screen ad view compared to other inventories.”

Read: The Future of Ads Is Conversational: Introducing AI Sponsored Snaps (April 28) – Snap

From tipsheet: It’s still unclear where these ads appear in the conversational flow — is delivery dynamic? Is the ad served in the first response, or the 13th, depending on perceived user intent? That detail would seem to signal how much intelligence is actually driving delivery versus traditional placement logic.

Expect targeting and timing to improve quickly as conversational ad formats evolve across platforms, especially ChatGPT and Google’s AI surfaces such as AI Overviews, AI Mode and, eventually, Gemini.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

• Google is testing AI chatbot search for YouTube (April 28) – The Verge
• Claude for Creative Work (April 28) – Anthropic
• AWS and OpenAI announce expanded partnership to bring frontier intelligence to the infrastructure you already trust (April 28) – Amazon

COMMERCE MEDIA

Best Buy’s Lisa Valentino on AI, transformation

“…Hovering over all of this is AI. But [Best Buy’s Lisa Valentino] is less interested in pilots than in structural change.

She said, ‘If we just take the playbook that I ran at other companies and inject it into Best Buy, we’ll see growth – but it’ll be a failure.’

Instead, AI is being positioned as a reset lever across the business – from planning and buying to back-office operations and customer journeys.

‘How does AI intercept how we transact, how we plan, how we advise?’

That includes partnerships with platforms like ChatGPT and Copilot, as well as experimentation with AI-driven creative and targeting. But again, the emphasis is on scale.

‘Right now, a lot of those pilots… it’s really about scalability.’”

Read: “Best Buy’s retail media vision blends stores, data and AI at scale” (April 27) – The Drum

GOVERNANCE

Agentic payments need standards

The FIDO Alliance, an industry trade group focused on creating passwordless authentication standards (like passkeys) for better security, is inserting itself into the AI and agentic governance conversation.

(FIDO stands for “fast identity online”.)

FIDO Alliance CEO Andrew Shikiar announced:

“AI agents are quickly changing how work gets done online – researching, deciding, and transacting on our behalf. But there’s a fundamental challenge: the internet’s trust model was built around a simple assumption – a human is always in the loop. That assumption no longer holds.

Today, the FIDO Alliance is announcing new work to address this – bringing together leaders across identity, payments, and AI to define how authentication, authorization, and user intent work in the agentic era. This includes a new Agentic Authentication Technical Working Group with leadership from CVS Health, Google, and OpenAI, and co-chaired by Amazon, Google, and Okta.”

Read more on LinkedIn. (April 28)

Google VP/GM of Ads & Commerce, Vidhya Srinivasan commented on Shikiar’s post saying, “AP2 will be in great hands under your stewardship, FIDO. Your dedication to open standards and engaging community will make one of the key building blocks of agentic commerce more widely accessible. Here’s to the next chapter for secure agentic payments.”

More:

• The Race Is on to Keep AI Agents From Running Wild With Your Credit Cards” (April 28) – Wired (subscription)

• The Agentic Era Is Here. Now We Need to Make It Trustworthy. (April 28) – FIDO Alliance

• Powering AI commerce with the new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) (September 2025) – Google Cloud blog

From tipsheet: Payments show the outcome. As agents start transacting, ads won’t optimize for clicks — they’ll optimize for purchases. Fast identity meet fast ads.

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OUT-OF-HOME

AI advertising is going outdoors

“Online marketplace platform Mercado Libre is using AI to update Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising. Headquartered in Argentina, the Latin American e-commerce powerhouse teamed with GUT Buenos Aires to roll out several ‘Custom Billboards’ in high-traffic locations in the nation’s capital, which analyse their surroundings in real time to generate personalised messages for passers-by.

Selecting an item from Mercado Libre’s catalogue, the billboard matches it with a suitable message and displays a QR code that links to the item, transforming traditional outdoor media into a new direct sales channel.”

Read: Are Mercado Libre’s AI Billboards the Future of Personalised Outdoor Ads? (April 28) – Little Black Book Online

From tipsheet: OOH is becoming performance media, thanks to AI.

I’m still waiting for more billboards in San Francisco to be transformed by digital, addressable formats — beyond, “Hey you’re in heavy traffic. Stay cool with some Lipton Iced Tea at the next exit.” Actually, that would be pretty good.

AGENCIES

Creo creating AI guardrails for influencers

Last week, Omnicom Media Group rolled all of its influencer advertising work under its agency Creo.

This week, Creo rolled out new agentic capabilities for brands that will filter out undesirable content with help from large language models (LLMs), specifically Google’s Gemini Veo and Nano Banana.

Adweek’s Lauren Johnson reported:

“The idea is to identify and remove flagged creator content — such as videos that don’t meet a brand’s safety standards or inadvertently promote a competitor — that marketers may not want to see in the final edit. Fixing these issues typically requires reshooting content and making additional edits, which can add up in fees and time, said Kevin Blazaitis, president of Creo.“

Read more in Adweek. (April 28)

Related: How tech partnerships are rewriting the rules of media accounts (April 28) – Ad Age (subscription)

PLATFORMS

Yahoo DSP: Why data is the queen

Making the case for its Yahoo Mail-powered identity framework in the age of agents and AI, Yahoo DSP product leaders Srinivas Bhagavatula and Dhaval Khamar wrote on the Yahoo blog yesterday:

“‘AI’s outputs are only as good as its data inputs.’ In the rapidly emerging agentic AI era, this phrase may be cliché, but it’s never been more relevant.

If AI agents are the king of this new era, then data is the queen. And without its queen, the king doesn’t stand a chance. Agents do far more than just generating content. They make decisions, take actions, and operate at scale. But that power is only as strong as the underlying data guiding it, meaning that high-quality, reliable data is what enables AI to move from insights to action.”

Read: Why Data Is the Queen in the Agentic AI Era (April 28) – Yahoo blog

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Where Adobe is going with AI, marketing

Adobe’s $1.9 billion acquisition of AEO/SEO firm Semrush closed yesterday.

Adobe’s VP of Strategy & Product, Loni Stark, discussed the positioning going forward for Semrush and Adobe.

She wrote on LinkedIn:

“Pairing Semrush’s discoverability intelligence with [Adobe Experience Manager] (AEM), LLM Optimizer, Commerce and Brand Concierge gives our customers something no one else can offer: visibility across every AI and search surface and deeper engagement on their owned properties, optimized for humans and AI, in one system accelerated by AI. Big day for the team and for our customers.”

Read more. (April 28)

More: Adobe to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion (November 2025) – TechCrunch

LLMs & CHATBOTS

AdMarketplace enters chatbot ad network arena

Product leader Sam Cox discussed his company’s new “AI Discover” ad product for AI chatbots on AdExchanger yesterday as AdMarketplace enters the chatbot ad network arena.

Now in beta, AdMarketplace — which positions itself as a “native search advertising company” — has already run “2 million sponsored placements (…) across roughly 700,000 AI queries,” according to AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff.

Schiff reported:

“Under the hood, AI Discover runs on two adMarketplace systems. One is called Commercial Intent Vector, which scans a chat for commercially relevant topics like products, brands and categories and turns them into ad targeting signals. The other is Arena, an ad-decisioning engine that takes those signals and decides which sponsored placements to show.

Arena matches the commercial intent output against an index of more than 200 million product ads and ranks potential sponsored placements based on relevance.”

Read more on AdExchanger. (April 28)

In the press release, AdMarketplace makes clear it intends this product for performance advertising, “Unlike impression-based models, AI Discover Beta operates entirely on a CPC basis. Advertisers only pay when a consumer clicks through to their site, not for exposure or impressions. Every ad dollar is tied directly to consumer action, ensuring spend goes toward consumers who actively chose to engage with a brand.

More: “adMarketplace Launches AI Discover Beta to Improve Consumer Discovery in AI Search” (April 28) – press release

From tipsheet: With AdMarketplace yesterday, Dappier on Monday, Taboola enhancing its Deeper Dive product, and startup Koah collecting investment in February, the chatbot ad network land grab is heating up.

How they perform for the publisher and the advertiser will be the ongoing questions.

Also on the sell-side, is there a lock-in with these products or can you hot swap ad networks in your chatbot conversation waterfall? Ad ops has a new domain!

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Chatbot trends: Say ‘best’ — get an ad

On LinkedIn, CMO Ashley Fletcher of Adthena shared ChatGPT ad trends his company’s AI visibility platform has observed recently.

He explained:

1. “ChatGPT ads are a ‘best X’ engine.” – meaning if you want to see an ad, say “best”
2. “Brand hijacking on comparison prompts is the norm.”
3. “Finance ads are running despite OpenAI’s restrictions.”
4. “Publisher affiliates are quietly winning.”
5. “The advertiser pool is barbell-shaped.”

Read this one on LinkedIn. (April 28)

From tipsheet: Sure — Fletcher is talking his own book. Nevertheless, plenty of fascinating trends including the potentially positive impact of AI chatbots on publishers’ affiliate business. This finding sounds a bit like ZeroClick’s business (from the founder of Honey).

MORE

• Special Report: The Future of Marketing – Financial Times
• Can Meta make money on AI beyond consumer ads? That’s a big question going into earnings. (April 28) – Marketwatch
• The Trade Desk, Pacvue, and Skai Unlock Unified Activation and Measurement Across 250+ Commerce Media Partners (April 28) – press release
• India’s ReBid launches agentic AI-powered tool to benchmark creative performance (April 28) – The Economic Times
• JWX and StackAdapt Partner To Give Advertisers Access to Consumer and Content Signals for Ad Targeting (April 28) – press release