On Wednesday, March 27th, The Ad Council partnered with Snapchat to host its first-ever Creative Inspiration Session at Snapchat’s NYC offices. The event was hosted for our partners to gain updated learnings on Snapchat’s platform. During the two-hour session, Snapchat took the time to walk us through the platform’s ad products, new capabilities and much more.
Check out a few of my favorite learnings below:
Useful Facts & Numbers:
- On average, 186 million people use Snapchat daily
- Snap’s community spends an average of over 30 minutes on Snapchat every day
- 20 app opens per day
- 3 Billion snaps daily
- 50% of interactions on Snap are likely between close friends
- Over 60% of Snapchatters turn on audio before using the app
Ad Products
Camera Creation
- Snapchat Lenses - Snapchat’s augmented reality lenses allow you to add animations to your Snapchat posts - both photo and videos (up to 16 seconds). Snapchat lenses track your facial features and apply an animation that will follow your facial movements. The Ad Council has worked with Snapchat to create a number of lenses, notably for our Wildfire Prevention campaign.
- Snapchat Filters - This is a photo overlay that can be applied to a photo after it’s taken. There are numerous types of filters such as Static, Sponsored, Smart Name, Smart Time, Smart Location (geofilter). Ad Council partnered with Snapchat on a few campaigns to create filters around key and relevant times of the year, Bullying Prevention is one that we have done 2 iterations for. Our Texting & Driving Prevention campaign partnered with Snapchat to create an animated filter during Distracted Driving Awareness Month (April 2018).
Consumption
- Snap Ads - These are full screen, opt-out ads ranging from 3-10 seconds. Advertisers have the ability to add attachments such as an app install to ads.
- Commercials - :03-:06 second, sound on, non-skippable ads.
- Story ads - Targeted ads where you can publish long-form video by including up to 30 snaps (200 seconds).
- Collection ads - A new Product designed for Commerce. This capability allows brands to feature a collection of four products from their catalog in a single ad on Snapchat in addition to a “shop now” tag.
Augmented Reality
Snapchat pioneered the Augmented Reality space and introduced their first AR product in 2015, long before other media companies. 70% of Snapchat users play with AR every day. As Snapchat continues to evolve its AR capabilities they’ve really honed in on gameafying lenses and adding more complex animations. Now when using lenses, you can activate AR not only with facial tracking but when flipping the camera to world view as well.
Another area where Snapchat is continually reinventing their AR capabilities is by using QR codes (Marker Tracking AR). When unlocking snapcodes within the app and selecting the eligible lenses you can point the camera screen at 2D images and your 3D AR experience will begin once the image is recognized. From making Alexander Hamilton come alive on the $10 bill by singing along to the Hamilton musical, LeBron James jumping out of a poster to dunk right in front of you or a shark popping out of your screen to promote the new Jaws movie, Snapchat is a clear innovator in this space. With Snapchat, augmented reality doesn't need a gaming console and headset or any other equipment to have access to an experience, it’s all right within your fingertips.
Creative Inspiration Sessions like these really help deepen our understanding of the platform as well as our partners. We had the opportunity to have a front row seat into Snapchat’s best practices. Coming out of these sessions the goal is to incorporate the learnings into future Snapchat partnerships, but also to inspire our partners to take the learnings beyond Ad Council campaigns.
Thanks to Snapchat, we learned endless ways that we can use their capabilities and create an impact using their platform. We hope to continue having informative sessions like this so we can use the platform in the more innovative ways and ultimately drive impact for our campaigns.