As White Friday, the Dubai Shopping Festival, Ramadan and the year-end gifting season approach, brands face a critical question: how do they influence shoppers before purchase decisions are made? For Antoine Challita, Snapchat’s Head of UAE, the answer lies in the conversations consumers have with friends and family, often long before they click the buy button. He discusses how Snapchat is shaping product discovery and purchase decisions across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, why brands risk arriving too late when they focus only on peak shopping days, and how creators, augmented reality and AI can turn discovery into sales. He also explains why marketers need to look beyond last-click attribution to understand the platform’s wider influence on consumer behavior.
Snapchat describes shopping as moving “at the speed of friendship.” What does that look like in the UAE right now, and what are you seeing in how people here discover and decide on what to buy?
Shopping here is a group decision. Someone sees a product, sends it to a friend, asks if it is worth it, and the answer decides whether they buy it.
Snapchat is where a lot of that happens. 68% of daily Snapchatters in the UAE say the app helps them discover brands or products they had not heard of before. 71% say content they saw on Snapchat led them to buy or plan to buy. That is what we mean by shopping at the speed of friendship.
Why do you think recommendations from friends and family carry so much weight with consumers in this region compared to other markets?
In this region, people rarely buy anything that matters without asking someone they trust first. That is not new, it predates every platform. What has changed is that the conversation now happens in Chat.
In Saudi Arabia, 80% of daily Snapchatters used the platform to chat with friends and family about gift ideas during the year-end shopping season. Our research consistently shows that friends and family play the biggest role in shaping Snapchatters’ final purchase decisions, even more so than for non-Snapchatters.
For brands, that shifts the question from how to reach a consumer to how to give the consumer something worth sending to the person whose opinion counts.
You talk about brands joining the conversation before the purchase is final. How can a brand do that without feeling intrusive in what are really private chats between people who know each other?
The honest answer is that a brand should not try to join a private chat. The better route is to give people something they want to bring into it themselves.
In practice there are three things: an AR experience that shows the product on you or in your home, content that answers a question the shopper already has, and a recommendation that is easy to forward. Sponsored Snaps add a fourth: a branded message in Chat, clearly marked, that people choose to open or ignore.
A simple test helps: if nobody would share it, it is not ready for that conversation.
With White Friday, DSF, Ramadan and year-end gifting all coming up, how should brands think about their Snapchat approach across these different shopping moments?
Two things matter most: start before the moment, and treat each moment differently.
In the UAE, 72% of daily Snapchatters say seeing ads early helps them shop in advance, while in Saudi Arabia, 41% typically start planning for year-end shopping before December. Brands that only show up in White Friday week are arriving after many decisions have already been made.
Each moment is a different job. White Friday is value and urgency. Ramadan is cultural and emotional. Year-end gifting is about consideration and personal relevance. Pick the role you play at each one and change the message, not just the dates.
Which tools or formats, whether AR try-ons, Lenses or shoppable ads, are working best for retail and e-commerce brands on Snapchat at the moment?
There is no single best format; there is the right format for the job you need done.
AR when you need people to see and share the product before they buy. Reminder Ads when you are building to a drop or a date. Sponsored Snaps when you want a direct line to the shopper in Chat.
What they have in common is less friction. 63% of daily Snapchatters in the UAE have made an impulse purchase after seeing an ad or content on Snapchat. When discovery is easy to act on, people act.
A lot of this influence happens in private messages that are hard to track. How do you help marketers understand and measure Snapchat’s role in getting someone from discovery to purchase?
The last click tends to get credit for a decision that was made much earlier.
In the UAE, 91% of daily Snapchatters have taken at least one shopping action after seeing holiday content on Snapchat: looking for inspiration, researching, discussing with friends or family, buying, sharing afterwards. Most of that never shows up in a last-click report.
Whether it is about measuring lift for brands or conversion, or doing MMMs, my advice to marketers is to measure the stages, not only the transaction. That shows where consideration is actually built and where the money works hardest, which is often not where a last-click dashboard suggests.
Is there a brand in the region you’ve worked with recently that really got this right? What did they do differently?
A good recent example is AIVI in Saudi Arabia. We ran a creator-led campaign: local creators showing curated AIVI collections in their own style, amplified with Snap Ads and Sponsored Snaps.
Results: more than six million people reached, app installs up 58% year on year, new customer purchases up 40%, brand awareness up four points.
What they did differently was trust the creators. The creators brought credibility and discovery; the ad products turned that into installs and sales. Many brands invest in the second half and under-invest in the first.
Another good example is Level Shoes which leveraged Snapchat’s First Story placement alongside its always-on performance campaigns in the UAE and Kuwait. The campaign drove 103% higher install conversion rates and 433% higher purchase conversion rates in the UAE, and 40% and 55% increases respectively in Kuwait, compared to DR-only audiences.
How is Snapchat’s audience in the UAE (and KSA) evolving, and what do brands still get wrong about who’s on the platform?
The biggest thing brands still get wrong is treating Snapchat as a Gen Z platform. It leaves money on the table and the opportunity lost to businesses becomes big.
In the UAE, Snapchat reaches more than half of the addressable population, including three in four 18 to 34-year-olds. In Saudi Arabia, it reaches more than 26 million people every month. And across both markets, Snapchat is known for something few platforms can claim: strong reach among GCC nationals. Emiratis and Saudis are among the most coveted audiences for any business in the region, and they are on Snapchat every day.
Snapchatters in the UAE or KSA have purchasing power, broad interests and real influence over household spending. For brands, the opportunity lies in understanding their behaviors: what they discover, who they influence and where they spend.
What role are creators playing in shopping conversations on Snapchat, and how should brands work with them?
Creators used to introduce products. Increasingly they help close the decision. People use them to research, validate their choices and feel confident before they buy.
Two rules. Pick creators for their connection to the category and the audience, not their follower count. Then let them talk the way their followers expect; a creator who sounds scripted loses the credibility you hired them for.
The results reinforce this. Campaigns with Creator Ads delivered 1.8 times stronger ad awareness and 2.5 times stronger action intent than campaigns without.
Moving forward, how do you see AI and AR changing the way people in the region shop with and through their inner circles?
Both are making digital shopping feel more like real life, not less.
AR lets you try the product and send the result to someone whose opinion you want. AI makes the feed, the content and the creators more relevant to what you are actually looking for.
The point people miss is that neither removes the friend from the decision. AI improves relevance, AR builds confidence, and the person you trust still has the final word. That is the opposite of transactional.
If you had one piece of advice for CMOs planning their shopping season campaigns this year, what would it be?
Budget for the weeks before the peak, not only the peak week itself. That is when most decisions are shaped, and it is the cheaper moment to influence them.
Three things: lock the pre-season window early, create content people want to share rather than just an offer to click, and measure the whole path so the early spend gets credit for driving sales.
