Our guest on CMA Connect this week is Matt McGowan, Director and General Manager of Snap Inc. Canada, and an active member on the CMA's 'Media Council'. Matt joins John Wiltshire to dig into the topic of augmented reality (AR) in today's media mix.

• Journey from the early days of YouTube at Google to today's vertical streaming, AR assisted landscape in Snap

What mobile video was to streaming 12 years ago is what, in 2022, augmented reality is as "the new thing in advertising". We've moved beyond 'helmets', to glasses, to interplay with augmented reality on smartphones. Matt talks about why Snapchat is a camera company: "when you open the app, you open a camera where we empower you to overlay augmented reality; to overlay computing on that world."

• Is AR mature enough for marketers to use in reaching their targeted clients? (4:38)

"Yes! You can use augmented reality to entertain yourself, grow some bunny-rabbit ears or dog ears, but you can also use augmented reality to make purchases. Smart cameras with LiDAR sensors can sense depth, size, and so forth. Our Snap camera has something we call 'Fit Tech', which can size you. We've seen AR take off with apparel companies and retailers."

• Where does AR fit in the marketing mix? (8:46)

"At Snap, we have a self-serve ads manager very much like our peers. You create an account, put in a credit card, and you're off to the races. You can upload your vertical video from other platforms, as well as your augmented reality. Outside of the ads manager, we also have software called 'Lens Studio' which is like a new version of Adobe Photoshop that is much easier to use for non-designers. If you drop a lens alongside your Snap ads, you're likely to see 40% incremental reach. There's a definite upside to using AR."

• 'In 2025, will AR be baked into everything we do as marketers?' (16:03)

"There's a lot of chat right now about augmented reality versus virtual reality. We truly believe that layering computing on the world in front of you, or 'augmenting reality' is the right approach. In 1998, cell phones had just started to hit the market. That phone has evolved so much over the decades. I firmly believe that evolution isn't going to stop all of a sudden."

Tune into this episode of 'CMA Connect' for the full conversation between Matt McGowan and John Wiltshire.