Last week, the January Digital team joined clients and industry leaders at Snapchat’s Performance Summit in New York City to discuss how brands can make every media dollar work harder heading into Q4.
From measurement and customer acquisition to finding new sources of growth, conversations with PacSun, American Eagle, Kitsch, and Skechers made one thing clear: the performance playbook needs to evolve.
The path to purchase is less linear, attention is more fragmented, and the channel that gets credit for a conversion is not necessarily the one that created demand. As brands enter the most competitive stretch of the year, the opportunity is not simply to push more spend through the channels already driving the business, but to understand where else incremental growth may be hiding.
Here is what our team took away from the Summit and how marketers can apply it heading into Q4
Finding Your Next Customer Requires Looking Beyond the Last Click
One question came up repeatedly throughout the day: Where is your next new customer?
For many brands, performance marketing has become very good at reaching people already close to a purchase. The challenge is understanding which channels are actually introducing new customers to the brand and creating incremental demand.
That requires looking beyond platform attribution and last-click performance.
Skechers shared that it initially turned to Snapchat because it was reaching the same audiences too frequently across Facebook, Instagram, TV, and display. Snapchat offered access to a meaningfully different audience, but its impact was not always visible through last-click measurement. That disconnect reinforced one of the day’s biggest themes: marketers need a broader view of how channels contribute to the entire customer journey.
PacSun, Kitsch, and American Eagle echoed that shift. The conversation is moving away from asking whether one channel can “beat” another and toward understanding how each contributes to the overall media mix, including new traffic, new customers, offline sales, and incremental growth.
For Q4, when costs rise and retargeting pools become increasingly competitive, that distinction matters. Brands should be asking not only, “What converted?” but, “What created demand that would not have existed otherwise?”
The Customer Journey Is Moving Into More Personal Spaces
Consumer behavior is changing in another important way: more interaction is happening within smaller, private networks.
Snap shared that 70% of digital communication now lives within a user’s “Top 5 Friends” tray, part of what it described as a retreat toward the inner circle. Decisions about what to eat, what to wear, and what to buy increasingly happen within conversations between people who trust one another.
That creates an interesting opportunity for commerce.
Snapchat is bringing Dynamic Product Ads into Sponsored Snaps, allowing brands to introduce personalized products within Chat. The Commerce Power Pack also brings together new optimization capabilities designed to connect discovery more directly to business outcomes across app and web.
For marketers, the takeaway is bigger than a single ad format. As commerce moves into more conversational environments, brands need to consider how they can show up naturally within the places where recommendations and decisions are already happening.
Creative Needs to Match the Channel, Not Just the Campaign
One of the simplest but most important reminders from the day was that creative performance does not translate evenly across platforms.
Kitsch discussed seeing creative that underperformed elsewhere become a strong performer on Snapchat because audiences interact differently depending on the environment. The implication is not to abandon a broader campaign idea, but to translate it into the language and behavior of each platform.
That becomes particularly important during Q4, when brands are producing more creative, running more promotions, and competing against an enormous volume of seasonal messaging.
Rather than distributing identical assets everywhere, marketers should build enough flexibility into their creative systems to test platform-native ideas, learn quickly, and scale what resonates.
Q4 Is the Time to Spend Smarter, Not Just More
Holiday inevitably puts pressure on marketers to increase spend. But one of the strongest messages coming out of the Summit was that more budget does not automatically mean more incremental growth.
Snap’s own holiday message centered on “spending smarter”: finding new audiences, connecting discovery to conversion, and optimizing toward the business outcomes that actually matter. Its Commerce Power Pack is designed around those priorities, including value optimization, third-party signals, and omnichannel optimization.
That is also the broader challenge marketers should take into Q4.
The brands that make the most of the season will not necessarily be the ones spending the most. They will be the ones that understand where new demand is coming from, measure the full contribution of their media, build creative for the environments where consumers actually spend their time, and remain willing to challenge assumptions about what has worked before.
As Q4 approaches, marketers should be asking not just what is working today, but where the next source of growth will come from.
