In an attempt to move ahead in the quest of differentiating itself with its top competitor Facebook, Snapchat is rolling out three new products for its for its ad offering lineup, which will be seeking advantages from its already accepted lenses and geofilters. The new products include World Lenses, Audience Lenses, and Smart Geofilters , whose introduction marks the largest update to Snapchat’s Sponsored Creative Tools since the advent of branded Lens in October 2015.
The first addition, which is the World Lenses is an add-on to Snapchat’s Sponsored Lens, which is already a pro in converting user’s selfies into ads. By utilizing the Sponsored World Lenses, advertisers will be able to frame contents for the rest of the photographs, excluding the faces, as well. This would include floating 2D or 3D objects, interactive content, and other stuffs.
Four types of World Lenses are being made available for now– the one in which 2D or 3D characters or product appear floating in a photo; action based lenses which prompt something to happen while tapping on an AR figure, for example the cloud which vomits rainbow; an “interaction” World Lens; and an environmental lens which adds additional lights and effects to the photo.
Not all the World Lenses will however be available for launch. For instance, Snapchat still has to develop support for the recently launched 3D objects in its ads. No clarification has been provided on the time when these lenses will actually come into action.
The World Lenses will be rolling out in all the nations where Lenses are available, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, U.K. , U.S. and others.
Apart from this, Snapchat is also rolling out Audience Lenses, which will, for the very first time, allow the advertisers to buy regionally targeted Lenses. Through the Audience Lens, advertisers will be guaranteed a number of Lenses which they could us to target specific audience based on gender, age or locality.
The third ad product in the queue happens to be an advanced version of Snapchat’s Geofilters. Using this ad type, the users will be able to bring forth a lamination of brands, which would appear on swiping left or right on the camera. A survey report, commissioned by Snapchat, reports that these Geofiters have already built a good fan base within the Snapchat community, where a bulk of people have used it at locations like malls, restaurants and gyms.
The new ad is named Smart Geofilter, which is used for automatically adding locations or other real time information to any Geofilter. And since it is automatically updated, you may include your college name, airport, mall or your neighborhood to the ad.
Warner Bros. utilized the Smart Geofilter ads in order to popularize their movie “Everything, Everything” among the school kids by featuring the names of their schools in its ad.
In additions to these updates, Snapchat has also said that they have made improvements in their ad business zone, which includes seeding up the production timelines for Sponsored Lenses, which earlier took eight weeks, but will now be finished in six.
Rolling out such interactive contents on their platform may bring forth more and more users to the service, hence increasing the number of active users o the app. A regular user launches the Snapchat app at least 18 times a day, and spends roughly 30 minutes on the service on a daily basis. Also around 3 billion Snaps are created every day, against the 2.5 Billions snaps in the Q3 of 2016.
