Technology
Augmented Authenticity: How Snapchat and AR Are Helping to Redefine Brand-Customer Relationship
By Talia Klopper
It’s not just the way that brands promote their products and services or communicate their value that has changed over the last decade, but also where they do it. Driven by both advancements in technology and continuously changing consumer behaviour, marketing has undergone a dramatic transformation – shifting to a more digitally connected environment.
In fact, 60% of marketing is projected to be digital by the end of 2024, with a 10% increase in digital marketing spend recorded just between 2023 and 2024.
One thing that remains unwavering and unchanged, however, is just how foundational building meaningful and authentic relationships with customers is to market your brand. A strong relationship with customers will always be paramount to any brand’s success as it forms the foundation of trust and loyalty between the two. Simply put – it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, or what the quality or relevance of your messaging is, if your customers don’t feel you’ve built an authentic connection with them they’re unlikely to even listen to what it is you have to say.
According to the latest marketing statistics from Linearity, 81% of consumers require trust in a brand before purchasing them, 90% say that brand loyalty is crucial to purchasing decisions, and around 59% of consumers prefer purchasing new products from brands they are already familiar with. Authentic brand-customer relationships engender empathy, understanding, and mutual respect which in turn leads to increased brand advocacy, repeat purchases and recommendations.
It’s clear that investing in authentic relationships enhances brand perception, ultimately driving sustainable business growth. But, relationships take time to build, and in a more digital environment where face-to-face meetings, facial expressions and first impressions have been replaced with photos, posts and video screens, it can be tricky to do so. And, while social media platforms offer brands a way to digitally represent themselves and communicate to customers, they’re also a communication vehicle that limits a brand’s ability to personalise that communication as you’re trying to speak to as wide an audience as possible.
Luckily, there’s one platform that offers a unique opportunity to engage with customers on a personal level and foster deeper and more authentic relationships through community building – Snapchat.
Unlike traditional social media platforms where interactions occur with a wide and varied audience, Snapchat offers a more intimate setting. Despite being long misunderstood as just another social media platform, Snapchat differentiates itself by enabling an environment of closeness and authenticity as users instead curate their friend list to whom their Snaps are shared, creating a network of individuals they know and trust. As such, tapping into this more personal space in an engaging and meaningful way could be key to enhancing customer experiences, personalising interactions, and deepening brand engagement.
Leveraging Snapchat’s most unique feature – Augmented Reality
Taking this sense of intimacy to the next level is Snapchat’s integration of Augmented Reality (AR) through a wide selection of lenses which users can play around with including AR facial filters, location-based overlays, countdown timers, quiz generators and so much more.
You might wonder how this capability can help a brand foster deeper connectivity and relationships with customers but just imagine the possibilities. Imagine a furniture store brand that builds an AR Lens that allows customers to see what a small selection of sale items might look like within their own space at home just by looking through the camera of their mobile phone, or, an optical retail chain enabling customers to try on different designs, styles and colours of glasses and sunglasses wherever they are and whenever they want.
By superimposing digital information onto the real world around you, placing virtual objects into the real world and turning it into a digital interface, this immersive technology is a powerful marketing tool that is already playing a key role in consumers’ perception of brands, confidence in the quality of a product, and their purchasing decisions.
A recent Snap Inc study, in collaboration with MAGNA Media Trials, found that AR represents an opportunity for brands to reach the right audience when it matters most. According to the study, consumers found AR ads to be 5% more informative than pre-roll ads and 6% more useful than pre-roll ads. Additionally, AR ads helped consumers feel closer to the brand, got them excited about the brand, and helped to establish positive opinions of the brand by leading consumers to think of the brand as more up-to-date. Interactive Entertainment AR Lenses in particular were observed to boost memorability by 9%, enabling consumers to see the brand as 9% more innovative and 8% more unique than brands who don’t use them.
Essentially, AR ads are helping to capture consumers’ attention. But, that’s not where the benefits of AR ends.
Transforming attention into action
While AR can play a significant role in captivating an audience, AR marketing can also translate directly into action. Whether this manifests itself in increased website traffic, app downloads, or boosting sales, brands can leverage Snapchat’s AR capabilities to achieve tangible business objectives.
The Snap Inc study found that not only are AR ads impactful throughout the branding funnel, but most importantly, they drive intent to take the next step in the purchasing journey. For example, Shoppable AR Lenses compel consumers at the end of their journey, driving search intent up by 8%, World Facing AR Lenses impacts those in the middle of the journey and results in an 8% higher purchase intent and 7% increase in brand relevance, and Front-Facing AR Lenses help lift brand image for those closer to purchase with a 5% higher lift in brand uniqueness and 4% lift in relevancy.
These immersive, engaging, memorable and shareable experiences are allowing users to engage with brands in ways that help not just build relationships but long-term relationships in an age where authenticity and engagement reign supreme. By creating personalised AR experiences on Snapchat, brands can transcend traditional marketing boundaries and reach their customers where they are.
So, it’s time for brands to pivot from only shouting into the void of social media and instead speak directly to their audience, with intention, in their language.
Talia Klopper is the Partner Director for Snapchat Sub-Saharan Africa at Aleph
By Dipo Olowookere
The Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for MTN Nigeria, Mr Babalola Oyeleye, has disclosed that the telecommunications company intends to expand its infrastructure to give its customers quality service.
The demand for connectivity in Nigeria is growing, and with a new forecast predicting the Internet of Things (IoT) market to reach $38.7 billion by 2030, stakeholders, especially operators, are already positioning themselves to dominate the space
Government and private sector investments in digital transformation have created an ecosystem that includes system integrators and security specialists. Industries such as utilities and agriculture are leading the charge, adopting IoT to solve localised problems like power theft and low crop yields.
Currently, 4G coverage has reached approximately 80 per cent of Nigeria’s population, with 5G services already in major cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano. This connectivity backbone is essential for the low-latency communication required by millions of connected devices.
“Reaching the $38.7 billion mark isn’t just about the numbers; it’s about the millions of data points helping Nigerian SMEs and large corporations make smarter decisions every day. Our goal is to ensure the connectivity is there to meet this soaring demand,” Mr Oyeleye noted.
As the ecosystem matures, the focus is shifting toward all-in-one solutions that simplify the user experience. With ongoing investments in NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT) and other low-power connectivity options, the next five years are set to see an explosion in smart city and smart home applications across the country.
By Adedapo Adesanya
South African-founded Refiant AI has raised $5 million to slash the energy footprint of artificial intelligence (AI) in a seed round led by VoLo Earth Ventures, a top climate technology fund.
The startup uses nature-inspired algorithms to radically compress AI models, slashing the hardware and energy required to run them. The new fund will be used to scale Refiant’s team – which already includes a former Google Cloud architect, a Cambridge PhD researcher, and an engineer with NASA experience – to build out a platform and to accelerate enterprise partnerships.
According to a statement shared with Business Post, the company is in active conversations with several multinational technology firms exploring how Refiant’s approach could reduce their AI compute costs while maintaining data and energy sovereignty.
“AI’s growing energy footprint is one of the most urgent and underappreciated challenges in the climate space,” said Mr Sid Gutta, the company’s co-founder. “The industry’s default answer is to build more data centres and consume more power. Ours is to make the AI itself dramatically more efficient.”
The company said it has already successfully demonstrated it can compress a 120 billion parameter AI model to run on a standard laptop, reducing energy requirements by over 80 per cent while preserving near-identical quality. It achieved this to run on a MacBook Pro with just 12GB of RAM. The same model would normally require hardware with at least 80GB of memory. The model retained 95-99 per cent of its fidelity, ran alongside a second AI model on the same machine, and the entire process took four hours with no cloud computing required.
For Refiant, its approach will help businesses reduce their carbon footprint and adopt AI to stay competitive. The energy required to process a single AI prompt on standard infrastructure could power roughly 100 equivalent prompts using Refiant’s approach.
The current breakthrough results were attained at the end of last year, and since then, the team have been gearing up to demonstrate successfully exceeding these results with further compression, longer context windows and model traceability.
“The AI industry is spending hundreds of billions scaling infrastructure when the real breakthrough is the ability to do more with radically less,” said Mr Viroshan Naicker, co-Founder and a mathematician with published research in networks and quantum systems. “Nature doesn’t build by brute force. Evolution optimises. We’ve applied that principle to AI – and the results speak for themselves.”
“AI’s biggest constraint isn’t demand – it’s energy,” added Mr Joseph Goodman, Managing Partner, VoLo Earth. “What’s been missing is a fundamentally more efficient way to compute. Refiant’s architecture replaces brute-force scaling with a far more efficient, nature-inspired approach that lowers energy use while increasing capability. That’s the kind of breakthrough needed to make AI sustainable on a global scale.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
Google and UpSkill Universe, Sub-Saharan Africa’s leading AI and business skills training partner, have announced a major redesign of the Google Hustle Academy programme. For the first time, the free training initiative is open to everyone, not just business owners.
The new curriculum is focused on equipping individuals and entrepreneurs with practical AI skills and comes at a time when small businesses have become the engine of Africa’s economy, creating over 80 per cent of jobs on the continent. To help them grow, the Hustle Academy was launched in 2022, providing bootcamp-style training on business strategy, digital skills, AI, and leadership. The program has since trained over 18,000 SMEs, with many reporting increased revenue and job creation.
Now, as AI reshapes the job market, the program is evolving. The 2026 edition is built for anyone in Sub-Saharan Africa, including employees, students, and job seekers, who want to use AI to advance their careers. To meet the needs of a diverse audience, the new format includes short, 60-minute webinars and more immersive, high-impact bootcamps. These sessions are laser-focused on putting AI to work immediately in areas like digital commerce, marketing, and growth strategy.
Speaking about the academy, Mr Gori Yahaya, Founder & CEO of UpSkill Universe, said, “The 2026 Hustle Academy is designed to close the AI Skills gap with hands-on training that is short, focused, and immediately useful. AI is reshaping how businesses win and how careers are built, right across this continent. We’re excited to renew our partnership, now in its fifth year with Google, combining their global AI leadership with our deep regional AI expertise. The next wave of AI leaders will come from this continent. We are making sure they are ready.”
The Hustle Academy initiative has strengthened digital competitiveness across emerging African economies by enabling SMEs to move beyond AI awareness to practical implementation, positioning them for sustained growth in an increasingly AI-driven business environment.
“We believe that the future of Africa’s digital economy lies in the hands of individuals and entrepreneurs alike. Our new strategy focuses on scaling reach by training individuals in the latest AI-centred tools and techniques,” said a Google representative.
Applications for the 2026 cohort are now open. Interested participants can apply at: https://rsvp.withgoogle.com/events/hustle-academy
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