The Consumer Is the Product Manager
Aarti Bhaskaran is Global Head of Research and Insights at Snap, where she leads a team that supports approximately $5 billion in advertiser revenue with consumer and advertising insights. She is a Cannes, ARF, and WARC speaker, a board member of ARF’s Women in Analytics, and one of the people most responsible for ensuring that 300 million Snapchat users have a voice inside the product decisions that affect them.
“A cost-per is a human action. Insights is the consumer’s advocate inside the tech company.”
Aarti Bhaskaran is Global Head of Research and Insights at Snap, where her team has doubled in size since she assumed leadership and now covers all consumer insights and ads research globally. She joined Snap in November 2021 as Global Agency Head for Research and Insights before taking over the full global function.
Aarti’s career is rooted in consumer research across multiple industries and continents. She spent nearly seven years at IMRB International in India, rose through Millward Brown in Singapore to Account Director level working across PepsiCo and Frito-Lays regionally, then led research and analytics at MediaCom Canada, growing the analytics revenue from four clients to 24 in two years. She moved to Kantar in the San Francisco office before joining Snap.
At Snap, her team occupies what she describes as a uniquely positioned role: simultaneously the consumer’s advocate, the fact-checker for product and sales decisions, and the source of the bold claims that go to Cannes and investor day. Her most recent research, on gen AI creative effectiveness, showed that AI-generated creative performed as well as traditional creative across standard KPIs and additionally drove perceptions of brand innovation. The key variable was transparency: when consumers were told the creative was AI-generated beforehand, acceptance was higher, not lower. For AR, where Snap has the deepest body of research of any platform, the convergence with AI is producing what she describes as the most technically novel work she has ever been asked to research methodology for.
“The convergence of AR and AI is where the next creative frontier lives.”
“There is so much focus on technical specs that you almost forget the human who has to use it. We come in as a reminder.”
Aarti’s framing of the insights function is not as a data provider or a validation tool but as the consumer’s permanent representative in rooms where product and commercial decisions are being made. At a platform the scale of Snapchat, the gap between internal expertise and user reality can widen quickly: engineers are focused on technical specs, sales teams are focused on impressions and CPMs. The insights team exists to make sure that behind every metric is a human whose behaviour and motivations are actually understood. The Snap creator business is her example: it grew organically from user behaviour, and insights was the function that helped the platform understand how to scale it without losing what made it authentic.
“People are open to AI-generated creative. But they want to know.”
Snap’s gen AI creative research produced a finding that runs counter to what many advertisers fear about disclosure. When consumers were told that a static image had been animated or augmented using gen AI and were shown the result, their acceptance of the creative was higher than in the undisclosed condition. The finding extends beyond creative: if you tell a colleague you wrote a brief using AI, Aarti argues, they are more likely to engage with it openly rather than trying to detect which parts are AI-generated. Transparency about AI is not a brand risk. It is the emerging social contract around how AI content gets used.
“Write a prompt and AR generates a lens on the fly. Three years ago that was unimaginable.”
Aarti’s description of Snap’s Imagine Lens, where a text prompt generates an AR lens in real time, is her clearest illustration of how rapidly the space is moving. Augmented reality was already a near-universal behaviour in Gen Z before AI entered the picture. Now AI means the augmentation can be generated from a prompt rather than pre-built. The practical applications are not just entertainment: furniture placement, clothes and glasses try-on, real-time product visualisation on Amazon. The research challenge is that no methodology exists yet for many of the questions this raises. Aarti describes building the instrument as she tells the plane where to fly.
Stay close to the conversation.
New leaders and insights. No noise.